At our January 18, 2025 planning meeting, we discussed potential improvements to our monthly meetings and field trips. Once Mark has confirmed that we will be able to tour certain sites, the monthly agenda will be posted on our main page.

These are the additional notes we took during the meeting. If you see errors or omissions, please let us know via the comments and we will update this page.

We agreed that members in good standing (those who have paid annual dues) will receive notification by SMS text messages reminding them of upcoming meetings. These will typically be sent on Wednesday prior to the meeting.

We agreed that we will continue to notify members and potential members of planned activities by periodically updating:

We discussed additional activities we may want to do during 2025. These include (and are not limited to):

  • Having a “pop up” class for members on how to properly pin insects (including proper collecting information to record on attached labels).
  • Having a “pop up” class on gardening with insects in mind (attracting and repelling selected insects and more).
  • Perhaps reaching ou to like minded groups and collaborating further with those groups (if both groups are interested).
  • Having some night observing sessions in the central Illinois area. This may include the use of mercury vapor lamps to attract night flying insects, using the older approach of sugaring for insects, and using the European approach called wine roping (yes, that is a thing).
  • We may also investigate overnight camping trips to locations in Illinois and nearby states.
  • We are developing an insect of the month passport. Members in good standing who supply a photo of the “insect of the month” taken during that month will be eligible for a prize at our January, 2026 planning meeting.
  • We may also use the member supplied photos to create an insect calendar for 2026.

We discussed that we will definitely participate in the Forest Park Nature Center Earth Day celebration to be held on April 26, 2025. This should not conflict with our planned April excursion (to be held the prior Saturday).

We also discussed having a central repository project at iNaturalist focusing on insects of central Illinois. I (Mark) just created this. Members are encouraged to join and post their observations.

After the meeting several of us discussed also having a shorter name to make it easier to direct individuals to our website. The domain ourbugclub.net was selected (and registered). Try the link out if you want. Yes, the .net top level domain is a pun. How else would one find an insect group (except with the use of dot net).