A friend’s carefully reared Orchid Mantis…isn’t she lovely?
Wild Fritillaria spp.
Kettle dyed handspun single ply wool silk blend…..mmmmm.
Ripening blueberries.
These bees are Buddhists October 14, 2007
This is the little garden out at our research farm where the honeybees have one half of the 10 acres and the horticulture department and organic farmers have the other.
The hives are out of sight, but do you see the all the birdhouses hanging up in the tree? Bumblebee nests.
The hanging bells are CO2 cannisters cut in half and painted gold. There is a Thai Buddhist symbol of the elephant and the monkey with honeycomb hanging in the center. Just behind, there’s a drop off to a small tributary of the Willamette River.
My club was out there with the master gardeners planting a water wise garden. While we were having tea during a break, we were standing around the hives.
You have to believe me: these are the calmest bees in the world. Several landed on my sweater, and I petted them. And they were like, “Okay”.
Then we went back to work, and here’s part of the garden coming together. You can see a good amount of the farm in this view. Did I mention it was foggy?
The plants in this garden are several sedum varieties, penstemon, rosemary, agastache, one tiny juniper, cistus, ceanothus, a dwarf native iris, helianthemum, and coreopsis.
As I write this, I am wondering if the deer, who ran by that hoop house in the distance maybe 2 minutes after I took this photo, came and did a little mowing last night. Beasts.
These guys provided the background music.
And I have nice things to say about this Shantung Maple. Lovely.
Trivia Hoedown #9 September 29, 2007
The new term has begun, so we have a bountiful, if ever so slightly dry, hoedown this week.
1. Right now aphids are giving birth to the only males of the year. The males will mate with females and lay the eggs that will overwinter and emerge next Spring. Up until this point in the year, all the aphids that were chowing down on your plants were female and most of them were clones. A female aphid that you meet in July is pregnant with her clonal daughters, who, inside their mother’s body, are pregnant with her clonal granddaughters. Aphids give live birth up until the end of the season when they lay next year’s eggs.
2. Gorse, a spiny and now noxious introduction from Ireland, burns so hot because of its volatile oils that a fire that started on the coast of Oregon in 1936 nearly burned the town of Bandon to the ground. The fire could not be put out with water, and 1,800 homes were destroyed and 10 people killed.
3. I went to see a private garden yesterday that is 4 acres managed with no pesticides and only organic fertilizers. Not only can it be done, it was beautiful and is due to be featured in Sunset Western in the coming months. (More on this property later.)
4. I’m discovering this week that the differences between many maple species are so subtle, it’s tempting to try to identify every single one on campus before the midterm. That way, no matter where the Bataan Death March of Plant ID stops along the course, I’ll know the tree. It’s probably not going to happen.
5. To most of my readers, this will not be news: when you turn or clear an area for new planting or construction, you bring all the dormant weed seeds to the surface. That’s the reason for the sudden explosion of weeds, many of which you haven’t seen nearby recently, or ever. It’s like Christmas for weeds.
6. Buggy outreach, where you set up a booth with your beasties and encourage passersby to hold them, is delightful. There’s nothing like getting up one’s nerve to hold the big cockroach and then having it scramble up your arm and across your neck. The kid in question was surrounded by friends, so he was under extreme pressure to be cool and he was very courageous as I reached down his collar to retrieve his visitor. The random screaming and willies of other visitors to the booth were equally enjoyable. No little girl, you cannot hold the black widow.
7. Crane flies don’t eat mosquitoes, but yeah, it would be neat if they did.
8. New neighbors moved in recently and brought a mean case of Chainsaw Disease to their stand of 40′ poplars. It’s filled the street with resentment, but also anticipation for next summer. The trees were on the southwest side of the house and the new neighbor has no idea how hot our little hill gets in the summer. May you bake clean through in your house, lady.
9. I saw an Assassin Bug skating across the surface of a horizontal spider web yesterday. He wasn’t entangled, he was just cruising over it. It was during a walking lecture, so I couldn’t investigate fully – but it gave me pause.
10. When I’ve finished all 35 of the samples and you decide we need a larger sample, so we’ll do another 35, just give me a second to check my tears and ennui.
11. Remotes that you use in class to respond to lecture questions posed by the professor are about the dumbest things ever.
Paper Wasps and Facial Markings September 22, 2007
Every spring and summer, I’ve given the wasps that build their little paper nests around the house very wide berth. My father had a violent run in with a yellow jacket while on a ladder, and I couldn’t differentiate between my yellow and black hovering beasties and the ones he described. Incidentally, my father does a hilarious “something is stinging me” dance to which I have been an audience several times. He’s got moves.
When I started working in the entomology department, I took a keen interest in my wasps and did a little research. It turns out they are paper wasps, Polistes dominulus, and they are a more relaxed social wasp than the dreaded yellow jacket. They tolerate human proximity of about 8 inches with interest but no apparent alarm. This was driven home one day when I opened the passenger door of the car we use for ferrying dogs around and right below the hinge was a perfect little nest with a perfect little queen. Sometimes she was there when we pulled out of the drive, so presumably she is well traveled. She’s never wandered into the passenger compartment or been concerned by the door slamming or dogs nearby.
The paper wasp can be somewhat easily differentiated from yellow jackets by their orange antennae; they also fly with their legs hanging down and out, but there are other wasps who do this as well.
In the course of finding out more about them, I came across a study done by Elizabeth Tibbetts and James Dale of the University of Michigan. They’ve looked at facial markings and their role in individual recognition in a colony. After reading one of Tibbetts’ articles, I went out and observed the nest that hangs from the window ledge right above a shrub rose. That time and every time thereafter, the wasps that were at the outside of the nest and apparently standing guard were those with the heaviest facial markings.
With the judicious use of a long bamboo stake, I discovered they are also the ones most prepared to give chase if threatened. They are less shy than the wasps with the solid yellow faces who usually fly off when you touch the flower they are in or brush against foliage they are on. The wasps with the black markings on their face turn to face you when disturbed and notably, they do not back down. I haven’t tested their tolerance much, but it’s interesting to see how the markings so seem to rather obviously correlate with certain behaviors and roles in the colony.
Now that I’ve identified and made peace with them, I’m sorry that they’ll be gone soon as temperatures drop and the populations of the insects they eat drop steadily.
