First Blooms for Operation Pollinator 2013!

The Operation Pollinator plots are up an running!  I am very relieved--I thought that our long winter and cold spring had truly wiped them out.

The very first blooms up this year are from Eastern Columbine.  Lovely foliage, unique flowers, and the first red bloom I've seen in Operation Pollinator.

The bergamot continues to look great.  I think this could be this hardy plant's big year!

A few other plants that I don't remember from last year, but which don't look particularly weedy to me:

If anyone has any guesses on these plants, I'd appreciate the ID help!

Weeds in the Operation Pollinator Plots

A few weeks of warm weather have sped up the development of the OP plots.  I'm hoping to have at least a few blooming species within the next month, but for now the only things blooming out there are weeds.

You've probably seen the purple field invasion in the last few weeks.  These pictures aren't from my plots, but from a nearby fallow field.  Here's the purple painted culprit:

Purple deadnettle.  Sounds like a good name for a metal band.  According to the internet, you can eat this stuff!

Another likely suspect for the purple fields is henbit.  This weed can be a major problem in turf systems:

I've also seen quite a few violets in my plots.  This weed is very persistent, so I hope my plants start to crowd it out soon:

Finally, there are a handful of what I think is field pennycress.  Can anyone give me a positive ID on this plant?

And then there are these beasts.  These jerks really were in my plots.  You can see the bergamot foliage in the background.

Interestingly, there are many, many more dandelions in my control plots than in the other three wildflower mixes.

A good sign?  Another good sign is that the bergamot is coming on really nicely, even in sites that were struggling last year, like this one:

Can't wait until we start to see blooms!

Golf Course Management Features Operation Pollinator!

I am a very, very lucky entomologist, folks.  Golf Course Management, a trade journal published by the United States Golf Association, featured an article I wrote about Operation Pollinator.

This is big, big news for me, because every registered golf course superintendent in the US is subscribed to GCM.  That's about 16,000 people.  We've been getting some really positive feedback, and it feels fabulous.

Here's the link:  http://gcmdigital.gcsaa.org/i/118283/112

Yay!

Springtime for Operation Pollinator

We've had a very long winter here in Kentucky.  It's been chilly and wet all year, but we're finally starting to get some warm springtime weather!

This time last week, we had two straight days of snow.  Later this week we're supposed to have several days above 60F. I'm not going to question it.

The springtime weather drove me out to my Operation Pollinator plots to see how things were progressing.  It was wishful thinking on my part, but I hope to see some more recognizable wildflowers coming up in the next few weeks.

Currently, Operation Pollinator is looking pretty bedraggled and grassy.  There were only two plants that I thought might be early wildflowers coming up.

Does anyone know what this is?  Might be early bergamot coming up.  It looks mint-y to me.

This stuff was also coming up.  Lance-leaf coreopsis?  Might also be plantain or sorrel.

I've got my hopes up for more wildflowers showing up soon.  Can't wait to share all my new Operation Pollinator adventures!

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!