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The ocular must be cleaned with great care.
Objects can be stained using food coloring or
even with some household items.
Here, the Petri dish is being used to store a sensi-
tive object.
slide. After use, always rinse the pipette out several times with clean water so that
it is ready again for new experiments.
The cleaning of the lenses was already mentioned in the previous chapter. For this
purpose, use the special cleaning cloths (so-called lens papers) that are included in
a little pad in the kit. When all of the cloths have been used up, you can also use
a clean, dry, soft cotton or microfiber cloth (eyeglass cleaning cloth) or buy more
lens paper.
Some objects only begin to show their full splendor when stained. Biologists there-
fore often stain their preparations before looking at them under the microscope.
In this way, certain structures (e.g. cell walls) are sometimes made more visible. In
your microscope set, you will find two small bottles with staining solutions. A very
easy way to apply the staining solutions under the cover slip is described in Chap-
ter 5. When selecting the staining solution — whether red or blue or ever perhaps
none at all — there are no general rules. "Learning by doing" is the idea here;
finding out by trial and error what stain works best for which objects. The crite-
rion here for success is, of course, that you see more with the stain than without
it! Microscopy professionals often use very special colorants with which only very
certain structures (e.g. cell nucleus, cell wall, or the like) are stained. If you look
on the internet under the search terms "microscopy" and "staining methods," you
will find lots of interesting tips on the staining of preparations. But it's also a good
idea to simply experiment with household items. Red and blue dye (correspond-
ing to the microscopic stain reagents eosin red and methylene blue) are excellent
choices for this. What's more, an iodine solution is helpful for some objects. For
this, you can use povidone-iodine solution, which is available in pharmacies for
wound infections.
You can use the small petri dishes to store collected objects. But you can also place,
for example, a water sample or a dead insect you found, directly on the stage in
the dish and observe it using your microscope's magnifying glass function.
The scalpel will be very useful when you need to make large objects smaller before
cutting them. Careful — the scalpel is very sharp! Before being used for the first
time, it needs to be carefully unpacked and the protective plastic cover on the
blade broken off. Have an adult help you with this! After use, it's best to protect
the scalpel blade with a piece of styrofoam and to store the scalpel safely inside
the microscope box.
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