Last Friday I ordered a couple of hand lenses, since no good naturalist can afford to be without one. Yesterday afternoon they came in the mail (all the way from California—yay, USPS!). I ripped open the package with all the excitement of a kid at Christmas (and I have a recent example, so I know whereof I speak!).
I have to say, my initial impression is that someone sent me the child-sized version by mistake. They’re tiny! I knew they wouldn’t be the size of the good old Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass, but honestly, I was expecting something with a bit more heft to it. I guess I’ve been spoiled by the 1.25-inch diameter eyepieces I use in my spotting scope (not to mention the 2-inch diameter eyepieces I used to pop into my larger spotting scope). The larger of the two units is only 3/4 inch; that doesn’t sound too small until you remember that the entire lens assembly is only marginally larger than the lens itself! The smaller, more traditional one, is about half an inch! I think they should call them finger lenses, not hand lenses!
Nevertheless, I’ve already gotten even more up close and personal than I had before with the few scale insects remaining from the pest-level population I discovered on a couple of my plants a few days ago (in my more self-justifying moments I tell myself that I have to leave a few of them around to keep the lacewing population from leaving; Eric Grissell would be proud of me! In my weaker moments, I still have a go at them, since all I’ve seen for the past three days is scale insects and lacewing eggs; not a single “trash bug” or delicate-winged adult have I espied).
I’ve tried to get up close and personal with the assassin bug nymphs that are still hanging around, but for the most part insects that aren’t legless and antennae-less try to escape when someone sticks a hand lens up close. (After all, to see the image, you have to stick your face pretty close to the lens as well, and that kind of proximity to a large face has been selected against over millions of years of insect evolution.) Kelly Brenner has had some luck with using the hand lens in front of her cell phone camera as a sort of poor man’s macro; I’ll have to give that a try.
In the meantime, here are a couple of shots just to give you an idea of how small these finger lenses are. Here’s the smaller one, a Bausch & Lomb 10× Hastings triplet lens in front of a ruler:
As you can see, tain’t very big! Here’s its larger cousin, made by an optical company in Belarus (these things apparently were quite cheap at one point, but having found their demand, they’ve raised their prices until they’re only slightly less expensive than their competitor, the venerable Bausch & Lomb):
Some of you might recognize the weighty tome in the background as Stephen A. Marshall’s Insects, one of the best introductions to the class ever; a few of you might even recognize the insect in the picture as a chrysopid, the very green lacewings I’m hoping will get their collective act together and go after those scale bugs!
I’m looking forward to more adventures with a hand lens!