Sieving Chainsaw Dust

Last autumn, two large Wych Elms were pollarded in the hotel grounds. Long story short - the logs were sectioned into metre lengths, several months later (about 2 weeks ago) a guy turned up and chainsawed them into shorter lengths so that I could load them onto my logsplitter and reduce them to firewood-sized chunks. I did a day's worth of splitting last week, today I finished splitting the sawn stuff. The fella with the chainsaw ran out of fuel on the day, there's still an awful lot of laying timber that needs to be sectioned and split, but who knows when he'll be coming back now.

Very nearly done!

You'll have to excuse the horrible metal bin in the background. It's one of those commercial 1280 litre galvanised things, I simply removed the wheels and lid and converted it into a firepit (coz everyone loves a good burn up!) The stuff I've leaned up against the wall has still to be chained to length, each lump is about 3 to 4 feet long, I need it cut into about ten inch lengths. As you can see, a fair amount of chainsaw dust has accumulated on the ground. You'll notice that some of it is still lovely and damp, I figured it would be worth sieving for staphs and who knows what else!

Just because I'm quite impressed by how much wood I split today, here's a video I took afterwards. This doesn't include the stuff split earlier - that's already been stacked into the woodshed. Note the shovel handle at the end, I wondered where it had gone! 

Anyway, I collected a large bucketful of debris and then managed to persuade the head chef that it was perfectly acceptable to nab his largest sieve for the purposes of sifting sawdust for beetles. We've had our moments in the past, but he's a good chap really. I suspect he thinks I'm quite mad. Here's the set up

A nice alternative use of the staff smoking shelter that I built last year

I think it took me about an hour and a half to satisfy myself that I'd gleaned every beetle from that bucket of sawdust. I have to say, there wasn't an awful lot to show for it afterwards, but that's not entirely unexpected.

Firstly the logs were only sawn in March. It's been cold ever since, hence most beetles have been largely dormant. The few that have been active have only had a few weeks to locate the mound of sawdust, though I did find several larvae, so clearly something is breeding in there. I suspect that when the rest of the logs are chainsawed to length, presumably sometime in the summer, there will be a far larger influx of beetles. Time will tell. 

This is what I managed to sieve from that bucket of sawdust

 This is how they appeared a short while later

I undertook yet another botched ptilid gen. det. - bloody things! Transmitted light via my compound revealed nothing. I removed the abdomen, micro-pinned it into place and began carefully opening it up. Bugger all. Sheesh, clearly I'm doing something wrong! You can see in the image above that I resorted to whacking them all on the same card. The 'large' beetles on the right of the image weigh in at 5mm. The featherwings come in at approximately half a smidge above zero mm....

Anyway, I now have more beetles to play around with. Aside from the featherwings, a single Cartodere nodifer is the sole non-staphylinid in this collection. One is an aleocharine, that gets put aside for another time. The remainder seem to comprise just three species. I shall get back to you regards their IDs. I also grabbed a couple of larvae, I do after all own a copy of the RES key to beetle larvae so may as well see how well it works. I suspect Staphylinidae.

Edit: the breakdown of beetles sieved from the bucket is as follows
Proteinus brachypterus x3
Cartodere nodifer x1
Omalium rugatum x2
Dimetrota atramentaria x3 (lifer!)
4 featherwings, 1 smashed beyond all recognition, the other 3 still to be determined....
1 very small aleocharine not even attempted
The two larvae are staphylinids as initially suspected