Augochlorini

feel the guidepages are enriched by photos of bees on the flowers they visit as it is on flowers that everyday people are most likely to encounter insect lifeforms, especially bees.

That said, it should matter not that some bees have hundreds of photo-vouchers so long as each image contributes additional information to the guidepage about the insect.

Any thoughts on this, Kevin or John? Anyone else?

Where the plant is important to the insect - milkweed and Monarch butterfly for instance - I think it's good to show or reference the plant. On the other end of the spectrum, one could go batty tracking honey bees and the places they visit.

While we seem to be getting more plant info - Boris' influence perhaps - it's more conspicuous by its absence in the majority of posts.

My personal take is that huge batches of photos are daunting to review, stand in the way of ID, and more likely to be ignored.

An interesting point you raise, Thomas.

it is time to create a guidepage of the the better images (biological and ecological) which would be most useful for identification purposes. And the remainder would be relegated to a sub-guidepage to track geographical and monthly data for the maps?

This is an issue that we have discussed repeatedly. See a couple of forums:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/37412#33686
http://bugguide.net/node/view/112443#141891
It is a daunting task and some of us, editors, are doing the best we can but there is no much progress, though.

but the decision is way above my pay grade!

get paid?

don't?

I am doing this because I love it! I actually stopped working to pursue my self-directed learning project -- I couldn't shake the thought that I might be missing something out there!

At some point I will attempt to convert what I'm learning into a portfolio (my website) to request prior-learning credits at a college.

Of interest to the id'ers may be hearing that as of today I have canvassed the insect life of my park for one entire year. In retrospect, I see I needed to do that so I could make sense of which species find their way to the plantings in my back butterfly garden.

I recently shifted my focus onto my garden now that many of the its flowers are in bloom, or about to start.