What do you do on Thursday nights?

I party with beneficial insect predators and the coolest lab mates this side of the Mississippi!

On Thursday night, we went out to my experimental site on the university's research farm and ran a four hour experiment.  It was a long night, but we had fun.

We spent the evening documenting predation on both the larvae and eggs of a pest species, the black cutworm, while in two different environments:  low-mowed grass and high-mowed grass.  You could probably already guess that I'm pro high-mowed.  In addition to reducing inputs (gas, fertilizer, irrigation), high-mowed grass could also have the benefit of increasing beneficial insect populations (like predators and parasitoids) which would reduce the need for treating with insecticides.

Yay!

Eggs went out on garden stakes, 10 to a stake, 2 stakes per plot:

And larvae went out alive on corks which we placed into the ground, five per plot:

Don't judge us.  It isn't cruel.  It's science.  I swear.

End product:

These prey items stayed out for the next three hours, and every 30 minutes we went out and recorded what was being eaten, by whom, and in what quantity.  If we couldn't easily identify something, we grabbed it and took it back to the lab with us for future scrutiny.  Once it got dark, we used flashlights with red cellophane over the lightbulbs, as insects do not perceive red light.

I used a headlamp, as I am cool.

And here's what we were looking at.  I swear it's not horrific insect torture.  Can you tell I feel a little conflicted about this?  

Ants!

Wolf spider!

 We all had a super fun time!  No one was grumpy!  Camaraderie!

Go us.

Operation Pollinator rises from the dust!

Oh man has it been a rough month.  Many outside working hours.  Few blooming things.  As a result, also few updates.

Lo siento.

We're back in action now!  Slightly (oh so very, very slightly) lowered temperatures and some timid rainfalls have brought Operation Pollinator back to life.

WHO WANTS TO SEE SOME WILDFLOWERS?!

The annual sunflowers are really starting to dominate their plots, and they seem particularly attractive to larger pollinators like bumblebees.

The bergamot is also slowly coming back to life.  There's a ton of this stuff, foliage-wise, but few blooms right now.  I'm hoping for more recovery between now and September.

The New England aster is also on the rise.  I'm super impressed by this little plant.  It's been hanging in there since June despite record high temperatures, drought, and out-shading.

In newer faces:

My purple coneflowers are finally starting to come in!  This wildflower is a very popular planting around local houses.  If you have some of this plant around your home, good for you!  It's a great native plant that supports both pollinators and finches.

And there's plenty more of it coming on!  The immature blooms look dorky.

The lavender hyssop is coming in beautifully.

Bees love this stuff.  And so do I.

We also have some grade-A hoary vervain (a type of verbena) coming in--though I've only seen one of these blooming.

And finally there is one lonely purpletop verbena in the middle of my butterfly mix.  

The rest of this week is going into putting out more bee bowls to monitor pollinator populations, taking aerial photographs to evaluate floral density, and catching some extra bees for a collaborator who is investigating the endosymbiont communities associated with native bees (correct me if I'm wrong, Abi!).

Indigenous, but not native? What does that even mean?

What does that even mean?

Mostly it's a way of working around the fact that many of the "native wildflowers" we commonly see around us are not native.

That's right folks:

Queen Anne's Lace?  Native to temperate Europe and southwest Asia.

Bull Thistle?  Native to Europe, southwest Asia, and northern Africa.

Common Teasel?  Native to Europe.










St. John's Wort?  Most species are Old World natives.

Common Chicory?  Native to Europe.



 Larkspur?  Native to Europe.

They have, however, been here a pretty long time.  Most of the above species have been common in the North American landscape for the last several hundred years.

We call them indigenous because they often are an essential part of the landscape (native pollinators love many of the species listed here!) and because they have been here long enough to have evolved along with many of the native species.  We cannot call them native because, well, they aren't.

I truly wish I could include some of these species in my wildflower mixes, but then many golf courses (and other programs) would be reluctant to use them because they contain non-native species.  Planting non-natives would disqualify them from being recognized by several organizations, including the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program.

Which brings me to problem I've always had with this particular classification system:

Where is the line drawn between native and non-native?  Many species traveled from Asia to the Americas and vice versa over the Bering Land Bridge a looooooong time ago (with the bridge being submerged ~ 11,000 years ago).  We consider many of those species (such the current equids and camelids of Eurasia) to be native in their "new" range, but not in their original range.

Seriously, if someone has the answer to this, I'd be thrilled to hear it.  Is it the land bridge being submerged?  Colonization of the Americas by Old Worlders (Vikings? Cristobal Colon in 1492? Purported Egyptians?  Japanese?  Siberians?)?  Is there an arbitrary date?

Most of the information I've found has been weirdly unprofessional.  Lots of odd conspiracy theories.  I'm just a gal looking for answers.  Send me your links if you have them!

Inside the hive!

Ever wanted to see the inside of a bumblebee hive?  Curious about queen bees?  Like gross stuff?

We have all of those things in today's post!

Thanks to the hard work of my dear labmate, who has been more-or-less successfully (depending on how you feel about bee stings) rearing colonies of bumblebees as a part of his research, I now have a bunch of amazingly gross/awesome pictures to share with you all.

His bumblebee colonies were originally purchased from a company in Michigan and shipped to us in the "artificial hives" they have since lived in all summer.  The artificial hives are made of plastic which contains some cotton batting, and the whole thing is encased in a cardboard box.  The bees construct their own waxy hives inside this contraption.

Weird space craters or bumblebee hive?

This is what the whole contraption looks like as it's dissected to evaluate the colony.

Cool!  Those open craters are actually pupal casings.  We think that after the bees are removed from their pupal casings, those spaces become honey storage.  The shiny liquid-y stuff?  Definitely honey, though not the same as the commercially harvested stuff made by honey bees.

You can also see some powdery, earwax looking stuff piled in one of the larger craters.  I think that's pollen, but it might just be wax.

The larger, lighter yellow casings near the bottom of the picture might be ROYAL casings.  There are some serious queens up in those things.

Close up!

That little bitty white oval is an egg, soon to be a larvae once it is placed in a casing.

To give you an idea about the lifecycle of these fellas:

Size reference:

FYI:  I have GIGANTIC HANDS, so this isn't really the best reference.  

Finally, a slightly bedraggled queen, one of many in this hive:

Bumblebees are awesome, hives are disgusting, and the whole thing has been fascinating for me.

Cats are bees too

This is my life right now.

Frustration with grant juggling, dying wildflowers, and writing methodologies that I barely understand abounds.

Crunchy

It is seriously hot outside.  The combination of super-mega-volcano hotness, the lack of significant precipitation, and the crazy strong windstorms called derechos have really given the OP plots a hard time.  

An update on the example used in the last post:

Bergamot* two weeks ago:

Bergamot last week:

Bergamot yesterday:

It's rough out there.

Some of my Black-eyed Susans are looking similarly crunchy.

Before heatwave:

After heatwave:

It's just not a great time to be a wildflower.

*Vick, Albert F.W., Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Female scientists = lipstick, heels, and pink?

Serious sexism.

You all have probably already seen this, given the waves it's caused on the internet, but you might not have seen the website it's advertising:  

http://science-girl-thing.eu/

The website isn't that bad.  It has interviews with female scientists, spotlights some major achievements in science spearheaded by women, and has a good jobs section which includes all the STEM fields, not just the "soft sciences" women are often encouraged to pursue.

So why did they create this video as the teaser to the website?  The most "science-y" thing the young women in the video do is put on safety glasses.

SMBC posted a comic a while ago that I immediately thought of after seeing this video:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1962

We all have a responsibility to encourage and educate the young men and women considering careers in STEM fields, regardless of sex or gender-identity, and the best way to do this is leading by example.

Less gender-stereotyping and more profiling of successful female scientists will go a long way, European Commission.

Jeez.

Scorcher

Folks, bad times are coming for the OP plots.

We all know it's been dry.  High temperatures and low rainfall for the last 2-3 weeks have been rough on the wildflowers, and it's only going to get worse.  The wildflowers that had already peaked or were in full swing a few weeks ago are getting pretty crunchy at this point, and those species that should be taking the crunchy flowers place are not coming in very strongly.

For example, bergamot has been pushing its way up for the last month, and has been preparing to bloom for the last week... but bloom it has not.  The few flowers it did put out are looking a little ragged.

What the early bergamot blooms* from two week ago looked like:

And here is what it looks like now.  Kinda rough, for still being in the early stages of bloom.  And there are not a lot of these guys.

I really, really hope it rains soon.  Unfortunately, the current forecast looks a little like this:

So I'm steeling myself for rough times ahead for the ol' OP plots.

We do have a few species that are doing exceptionally well, considering the heat.  Rudbeckia, or Black-Eyed Susan, is definitely still chugging along.

We have a handful of Rudbeckia that are expressing a really odd morphotype.  My personal hypothesis is that this single bloom is just a a weirdo that tripled or quadrupled its expression.  Not the prettiest.  I thought it was a caterpillar fat-ass at first.  It still appears to have a lot of pollen available.  I wonder if pollinators don't recognize it as a flower?

If it ever rains, there will be more flower pictures.  For now, it will mostly be raggedy looking sunflowers and rudbeckia.  C'est la vie.

*Vick, Albert F.W., Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

We're famous!

Operation Pollinator was written up on Turfnet.com!

The story!

It's not a perfect article.  I've participated in these things before for the lab, and they are always a little bungled.  I don't think that a single one of those quotes isn't heavily paraphrased.

Also, my Liberal Arts senses.  They tingle.  Writing is a skill.  I'm not trying to pronounce myself an excellent writer, I just wish that we had a few more technical writers that could piece together sentences with some degree of craft.

I see plenty of these excellent writers in the blogs that I regularly read, and I know many of them are scientists or work in a technical profession.  Why isn't this skill--a skill that is clearly evident through their non-academic writing!--something that is prized, slapped at the top of C.V.'s, and encouraged in scientific journals?

Academia, you slay me.

Bee bowls, hand collections, and stung thumbs

Here's the thing about bee bowls:  they only kind of work.

It's important to use them because they provide a passive way to document pollinator populations without the inescapable biases that come with hand collections.  People will inevitably collect brightly colored, large, and slow insects with greater frequency than camouflaged, small, and speedy insects.

So we have to use bee bowls in conjunction with hand collections, no matter how disappointing their results may be.

Here's what they look like in the field:

I was expecting a soapy plethora of pollinator soup.  Bug soup it ain't.

We turned up a surprising number of flies (few of which were in the major pollinator family, Syrphidae), and waaaaaay more Japanese beetles than we wanted.

Gross.  Those guys are stinky after a couple days.

During the same couple of days that the bee bowls were out, we also performed some hand collections.  I'm specifically interested in which pollinator species are active at which wildflower species.  The wildflowers that make the final cut will attract a diversity of native bees in fairly large numbers.  If a wildflower species only attracts one pollinator species (especially if other wildflowers attract that pollinator just as well) or attracts only small numbers of pollinators, it gets the boot when it's time to recommend a final mix.

In order to do this, we're collecting 25 pollinators from each wildflower species at each site when it is in its most dominant blooming period.  That's 150 pollinators total from each wildflower species.  We'll later ID those insects as far down as we can--probably to genus or species.

There are a couple different methods for catching pollinators.  

The classic (and the one that gets you the most crazy looks from golfers), is an insect net.

Weirdly enough, we found that the best method was to simply use a plastic cup.  It was sneakier and allowed for a little more precision.

Unfortunately, both methods resulted in bee stings.  Those little jerks got both of my thumbs while I was holding them in the net.

Fortunately, I'm not allergic to bee stings.  So far.

Phew.