I recently bought myself a G-vac - for the uninitiated, a cordless garden leaf vacuum adapted for use as a bug vac - and I took it for its second outing this morning. How do you convert a leaf vacuum to a bug vac? Well essentially you tape a net bag over the mouth of the inlet tube. On a recommendation from a more experienced bug-vaccer I bought a nylon jam strainer bag to use for this (others use net curtain material). Now I will admit that the primary reason I bought the bug-vac was for spider work, and I wan't at all sure the jam strainer bag would retain insects as small as springtails, but on its first outing a couple of days ago I was delighted to find it worked with large spiders all the way down to springtails, including the little ones such as Lepidocyrtus.
A week or so ago, pre-vac, I had done some sampling in wet meadows beside the River Soar. At that time I'd spotted a patch of Juncus sitting in a damp hollow that looked interesting but I didn't have time to go there on my first visit. This morning I decided to go back and take a look, this time armed with the bug-vac. Bearing in mind this is a piece of electrical equipment, albeit double insulated to EU standards and designed to suck up wet leaves, I'm pretty cautious about mixing electricity and water because the 36V battery in the bug-vac could give out quite a jolt. I was therefore a bit alarmed that the bug-vac started spitting water out of the inlet when I stuck it in the Juncus, but the point of all this dicing with death is that the bug-vac turned up (alongside more run of the mill species) my first ever Isotomurus plumosus in VC55. I'm delighted but I won't be pushing my luck too far.
