Bob Belmont, Massey’s Training & Technical Director and a Board Certified Entomologist, recently walked the grounds of the Central Florida Zoo with Sandi Linn, the Zoo’s Director of Education, scoping out the best spot to place a special insect trap. In partnership with the Zoo, Massey will soon begin an insect biodiversity study that will hopefully lead to a complete biodiversity study of the entire zoo grounds.

Massey’s eco-friendly insect trap (similar to the one on the right that Bob has behind his own moth lab in Sanford, Fla.) will randomly attract night-flying insects to a walk-in screened cage. The special trap allows for the collection of a few bugs and the release of other insects during the day. Massey will be teaching interested Zoo employees how to run the trap, collect the samples, and then preserve and label the specimens to be of scientific value. Various other trapping methods will also be utilized throughout the year.

The Zoo will learn a great deal from this study about their local insect fauna and will begin to better understand insects, their food plants and adult flight periods. The published data will also likely spur similar studies and attract local and out-of-state scientists to the location.

Thanks Bob! We look forward to hearing more about this study as it progresses.

Remember in our Meet The Team: Bob Belmont post, we talked about Bob’s hobby of studying and collecting geometrid moths? For those of you that didn’t know, for the past 41 years, Bob has built a private collection of geometrid moths as a hobby.

Part of Bob's Collection of Geometrid Moths

Over time the collection has exceeded the space limits of his custom built lab at his home.  It also became too valuable to keep at home due to the rarity of many of the moths. So in December 2009, Bob donated his ENTIRE moth collection to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity in Gainesville, FL. Their Lepidoptera collection is the second largest in the world and will soon be the largest! The McGuire collection is kept in a very protected and climate-controlled environment utilizing the most modern methods of collection maintenance.

These two geometrids are new to science! They remain undescribed.

According to Dr. Tom Emmel, Director of the Center, Bob’s “…donation of 13,909 pinned and labeled geometrid moths was a valuable…and important contribution to our collection.” Bob said he plans to continue his hobby of studying moths and insects in his home lab and years from now, when he decides to retire, he hopes to continue studying geometridae at the McGuire Center.

In a series of “Meet the Team” blog postings, we’ll introduce you to the professional and technical team behind the blogs here at Massey Services.

Bob Belmont – Bug Guy

Bob is a Pest Prevention Training & Technical Director for Massey Services. One of his many jobs at Massey is to provide identification of insects and arthropods for our customers when our team is unsure of the true identity of a pest.

Why would the experts at Massey ever be unsure? Well, very often customers will scotch tape samples of insect specimens to paper that end up squished or crushed. Imagine trying to identify a hundred tiny flattened bugs that are already the size of a pinhead. Well, that’s exactly the sort of thing that Bob enjoys!

Bob is an entomologist who received his B.S. degree in entomology from the University of California, Davis, and his Master’s Degree in Entomology from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is also Board Certified through the Entomological Society of America, among holding many other professional appointments.

As part of his work at Massey, he trains technicians, provides quality assurance inspections at our Service Centers in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, sets company treatment protocols, researches new pest management methods and troubleshoots some of the worst pest problems that the company encounters.

His personal hobby has been collecting and studying geometrid moths of America north of Mexico. He has an enormous collection and has made contributions to major national collections. He even discovered a new species of moth.

Bob has also created his own insect office at home, converting an expanded double car garage to a climate-controlled laboratory, chock with a lab floor, TAP insulation that is termite proof, insect proof and even fire proof. The lab also includes 50 feet of counter top, a double sink, a special closet with insect collection devices, a shadowless photography station and he even tests new products to understand their properties and activities before introducing them to Massey for field testing.

So you can see, when Bob talks or writes about insects, we tend to listen – since he really knows what he’s talking about! In fact, Bob was featured recently on the cover of October 2009 Florida’s Pest Pro magazine!