Patience you must have...

...my young padowan.

So said Yoda, and in that one sentence he pretty much nailed the whole journey of looking at beetles.

The thing that I've been trying to get better at and have been spending a fair bit of time doing is dissecting small beetles. Beetles in the 1-3mm range. Small beetles. Tiny beetles.

And last night something almost magical happened. The Sericoderus that I found last week has been waiting for me to pluck up the courage to tackle it. So I did.

A 1.2mm Sericoderus

Holding it down gently, I used the binocular microscope and a couple of micropins to open the abdomen and fish out what at 20x looked like the bit i wanted. I then transferred it to a drop of water on a glass slide and took it to the compound microscope. I looked down, twiddled a few knobs and saw this...

A thing of beauty. A spermatheca, or in common parlance, ladybits. Matching it to the pics in the key I'm fairly certain that it's S. brevicornis due to the shape and length of the gland duct lobe. The diameter at it's widest point must only be about 0.2mm at most. The whole beetle was only 1.2mm!!

I feel my beetling skills may have just moved up a notch...