From the 28th April to the 8th May a training course in Taxonomy and Systematics of African Pollinating flies was held at Shawswood in Karkloof, KZN. The course is one of the planned outcomes of the ongoing Belspo-NRF project DIPTEACH (Diptera Museum collections as a source for taxonomic research and TEACHing activities) and is supported by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation project PINDIP (Pollinator information Network on Two-winged Insects (Diptera), a project that one of our Museum department head, Dr. John Midgley, is highly involved in.

The course was set up around daily activities that involved the teaching of collecting specimens (flies), using different methods such as malaise traps, hand netting and sweep netting. The students were also taught how to pin, label and preserve specimens and to identify specimens to family and genus level using the published volumes of the Manual of Afrotropical Diptera that the students were all given for the course. Each aspect of the course had its own lecture presented by the lectures involved namely Dr. Kurt Jordaens, Dr. John Midgley and Dr. Terence Bellingan.  The course was well delivered and will benefit both students and workers that attended the course.