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A screw-up with iPhoto deleted my 2013 “Scott Shot” of urban bee guru Scott MacIvor, so I’ll have to make do with 2012. With some regret, last month I waved bye-bye to my last urban wild bee nesting box – or, the last in the three-year study by ecologist and PhD candidate Scott MacIvor. Read […]
Green dots goooood; orange dots, baaaaad. What the heck are those green dots? I wondered, as I walked up Coxwell Avenue the other day. They were painted on most of the towering ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) that line this stretch of road. Oh no. Have they run out of orange paint, and are they coming […]
This hoverfly might be narcissus bulb fly. Boo hoo. It sure looked like some kind of red-headed bee to me when I found it sitting on a Pelargonium leaf in my west-facing window. Out came a drinking glass and piece of card to capture it while I researched: What the heck is it? Then I […]
A great idea for a DIY bee hotel, from St Fagans National History Museum in Wales Remember that hose the car ran over – and sprang a leak? It could have new life as a home for solitary bees. Look at the example above from St Fagans, the National History Museum in South Wales. St […]
A pre-dawn hummer goes for the nectar at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Long, thoughtful posts, full of depth and perspective, aren’t always possible at the best of times. They’re even harder when you’re trying to post every day for thirty days as a sort of shadow NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month – a poor […]
Clavate tortoise beetle on a chewed potato leaf. Note that teddybear shape on its back. Noticing some pellet holes in my potato leaves, I wondered if we’d been hit by flea beetles. Then I saw what looked like a small fleck of bird droppings on the leaf. When flicked, it moved. That’s when I first […]
Get those squishing fingers on. The lily leaf beetles are back, and they’re noshing on your Asiatic and Oriental lilies. In fact, they’re making like the two-backed beast, or beetle, to create the next generations of bright red eating machines. Until they earn their red beetle wings, these will be squishy brown blobs of beetle […]
Study nesting box for wild solitary bees Something special arrived in our back yard on Earth Day 2011: a nesting box for wild cavity-nesting solitary bees such as mason (Osmia) and leaf-cutter bees (Megachile). It’s one of 220 scattered in private and public spaces, including green roofs, around the city, as part of a […]
During a post-vacation check-up of my heat-challenged, newly planted Japanese maple this morning I spied this pixel-patterned egg mass. Aha! I exclaimed, summoning my vast store of entomological knowledge, Those are definitely the eggs of some kind of insect. No, I’m not an entomologist. But I can be a fairly good detective when it comes […]
Nip your lily leaf beetle problem in the bud, or in the egg, by squishing this pest’s red, shiny ova before they hatch. Here’s what they look like… laid in a line, on the underside of lily leaves. Oriental and Asiatic lilies are particularly yummy to the lily leaf beetle, and the three successive generations […]
I’ve been suffering a major case of butterfly envy. My neighbour M. has been luring the Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) over to his mature purple butterfly bush (Buddleia) for some time. This year, they seem more plentiful than ever. Hooray! But they’ve been giving my new Buddleias a wide berth. Then came this plucky little […]
So-called-summer 2009 has been the summer of love for lily leaf beetles. Since I wrote about them on June 1st, they’ve been arriving by the thousands, camping out and making music. And they’re hungry. Turn your back for an instant and you’re growing poles, not lilies. The whole stem is defoliated, leaving the bulb nothing […]