FABI’s Profs Mike and Brenda Wingfield and Dr Nam Pham recently spent an evening with Dr Jiri Hulcr and other members of his research team at the University of Florida on a final pine-bark beetle collecting visit to UF’s Ordway-Swisher experimental forest.  This was the shortest of all such field trips, specifically arranged to capture beetles in flight and thus a late afternoon/night event.  This meant that beetles could be captured in light and pheromone lure traps.  Previous trips extended over a number of days and included Ordway-Swisher relatively near the Gainesville campus of UF and the Deluca forest, some two hours south of Orlando.  All of these visits resulted in excellent collections of three pine-infesting bark beetles, both in flight and in early-stage galleries.  They have also yielded very large numbers of fungal isolates that have been purified and are currently being subjected to DNA sequence analyses.  In all, the research has yielded outstanding results relating to patterns of beetle-fungus interactions and many new and interesting fungi discovered.  These also linked to questions associated with the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award to Mike Wingfield that has contributed towards the costs of Mike, Brenda and Nam’s sabbatical in Florida.