Pollinators on Parade

National Geographic, which can still be counted on for phenomenal visuals, has posted a breathtaking photo slide-show by Mark Moffett of pollinators great and small.

Take a look-see. You won't be disappointed.

Taking the Sting Out of Monday

Marvelous photos showcasing the extraordinary diversity of bees.
Take a look!

Underrated Ants

Keeping bees has greatly increased my appreciation for ants—not that I was ever bored by them. Like bees, ants are social insects that exhibit impressively complex behaviors and lead wildly diverse lives.Last summer I bought a cool ant-identification guide that, while difficult for a total amateur like myself to use, blew me away with the sheer variety of ants to be found in our North American backyards. This doesn't even begin to touch upon what's out there in other parts of the world—or the literally thousands of "undiscovered" species. How wonderful and appealing to be an undiscovered species in 2010; I like the sound of that!

This rather amazing video from The Smithsonian provides a "guided tour" of some of the more exotic and interesting ants out there. Enjoy!

Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a nifty portal in which to while away the cyber-hours. As described on the BHL website,

"The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has recently funded the BHL-Europe project, with 22 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. In addition, negotiations are being pursued with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Atlas of Living Australia and contacts in Japan, India, and Russia to join the BHL consortium. These projects will work together to share content, protocols, services, and digital preservation practices.Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends – more than any other science – upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity."

As you can see, this is a major worldwide undertaking—a trove of amazing information, images, and ideas. You'll happen upon more data-sparks than you'll know what do with with just sailing through the tag cloud on the main page. That cloud will lead to you a veritable heaven of research on bees, trees, entomology, natural history, pictorial works, and tons of other interesting stuff.

On the left side of the page are BHL updates noting new additions to the collection, books of the week, and other news. You can subscribe to these updates via RSS feed. Have fun, and let us know what you find there.

Cricket Crawl!

On September 11, bug-minded folks throughout the NYC metropolitan area will be participating in the first ever Cricket Crawl—"An aural expedition and a celebration of life in the leafy jungles of urban and suburban NYC." (Rain date = Sept. 12.)

Learn more about this cool event on the Cricket Crawl website, where you'll find instructions for participating, links to great websites where you can learn more about the sounds and appearance of various singing insects, and info on the interesting line-up of collaborating organizations, including the American Museum of Natural History, the NY Entomological Society, Discover Life, the Appalachian Mountain Club of NY/NJ, and our own local and exceedingly fabulous Proteus Gowanus.

I'm helping to run the Cricket Crawl's Facebook page. Why not join up and get your cricket on? You don't have to live in the NYC area to get in on the fun.

NYC Wildlife: Woodcut Prints by Lisa Studier

A friend has been making these delightful woodcut prints of wildlife found in New York City: bats, birds, butterflies, turtles, and others. Here's hoping she decides to try her hand at our urbane honeybees.

Ant Rant

I've said before that my fascination with bees has opened the door to many new interests, including botany—a topic that once elicited in me an inescapable sensation of drowsiness.

Beekeeping has also rekindled childhood obsessions that, with the passage of time and the ravages of adulthood, were relegated to the sidelines.

Last summer, I wrote about how how beekeeping had "recharged" my interest in ants, those smart, social, industrious insects that mirror the lifestyle of honeybees in so many ways. Just the other day, I enjoyed a lovely meditation on a hillside meadow that included serious communion with some big black ants and their magnificent anthill. I had ants in my pants and I was happy.

Ants never seem to get the respect they deserve. They're just too small and fast and ubiquitous, and they don't make honey, or buzz around our flowers, or earn us money by their labor. But they are fascinating and important creatures without whose presence the world would be a very different, and much messier, place. Ants play a vital role in soil health and functioning, have important symbiotic relationships with many plants, and are considered "ecosystem engineers."

Bert Hölldobler, who has studied and drawn ants throughout his scientific career, was interviewed in the New York Times this week. In the interview, he talks about his longstanding collaboration with E.O. Wilson, the art of collaboration, the role ants play in our world, and what to do if ants invade your kitchen.

Read the interview with Bert Hölldobler here.

Prince (Metaphorically) Kisses Frog

Attracting Native Bees to Your Garden

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Watch.

Watch this.

And then, make yourself a cup of tea, settle in, and explore the amazing world of Isabella Kirkland—which is to say, our amazing world—in detail.

Help Legalize Beekeeping in New York City

If you live in or around New York City, now's your chance to help promote the legalization of beekeeping here in the Big (inadequately pollinated) Apple.

Just Food has been working hard on dual fronts (NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene and the City Council) to get beekeeping legalized here in NYC, just as it is in several other major U.S. cities.

Sign the petition. (I believe that, once enough signatures are collected, the petition will be circulated to the City Council and perhaps NYCDOHMH during this critical period when the current laws pertaining to beekeeping are under active review).

Learn more and download a factsheet on the many benefits of urban beekeeping by visiting the Just Food website.

Recent Things (Joni Mitchell Brackets)

"See the geese in chevron flight, flappin' and a-racin' on before the snow...they got the urge for going and they got the wings so they can go..."—Joni Mitchell ("Urge for Going")

Corn dog on the fly.

Pink corn.

Acorn takes the high road.

Birdhouse in which wrens spent the summer...
...and a mouse spends the fall.
Tomato plants covered at dusk on the night of first frost.

Snake skin in the bee yard. (Note outline of eye and jaw on the left portion of skin.)

Grass shadows on a great book by Jim Harrison.

A mushroom I thought was the shiny cinnamon polypore but now I think isn't.

Ambivalent leaves of staghorn sumac.

A tiny nest.

Grouse crossing!

"Hey farmer, farmer, put away the DDT now—give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees—please."—Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

On Plumbing, Snakes, & Hay

Warning: If you do not wish to see my septic tank, read no further!
A couple of weeks ago, our ancient septic system of unknown whereabouts began to act up. Quick as a whistle, Mr. Rooter was on the scene, and before long, earth-moving machines had arrived to dig about the lawn in search of said septic device.Using interesting high-tech methods, Mr. Rooter actually narrowed down the location fairly quickly. The cement, 1,000-gallon tank (which had not been excavated since who-knows-when) was revealed, pumped, and repaired where a broken pipe was creating technical difficulties resulting in ominous sound effects emanating from sundry plumbing fixtures, shaving years off my life with each and every resentful burble.
After the job was done, a large tract of dirt was left in its wake, a sort of surface-level, Turin-like effigy of the septic tank itself. At the stern instruction of my Lawn Guy, Jerry, who brooks no interference with the health of our lawn, Wren and I purchased a small sack of grass seed at the local Agway.

The other day, after much procrastinating, I finally got around to sprinkling the seed on the now hard-as-rock ground, raked it in (not really), and then covered it (sort of) with a light layer of hay, as per the Lawn Guy's directive.

I did this all half-heartedly because: (a) I don't really care about the lawn; (b) I don't think terribly well of lawns as an ecological proposition, but am too lazy to painstakingly rake leaves off a moss garden once a week or plant a million shrubs in its place; and (c) I have a trillion other outdoor projects to attend to. But the Lawn Guy told me to do it, and I never mess with the Lawn Guy.
Fortunately, I had plenty of hay on hand. I use it to build compost piles, mulch the asparagus, and put the various vegetable beds "to sleep," covered and safe from weeds, for the winter. Last winter, I made windbreaks for the beehives using "walls" of hay bales, which I subsequently recycled back into garden use. (This winter, in the spirit of experimentation, I'll try burlap windbreaks instead—an idea proposed by Beekeeper Andrew during his visit).

The truth is, I love playing with hay. For one thing, I adore the smell. It reminds me of being a kid at farm camp and jumping into mounds of soft, dry, sweetly aromatic hay in the Pennsylvania hayloft, as August light eked through the slatted barn beams and Richard Nixon resigned. Happy memories!

I also love playing with hay because it's full of fabulous life forms that, in hauling, disassembling, and redistributing the bales, I get to commune with. For example, after unloading my first bale from the wheelbarrow, I met these cool spiders.What kills me about this last arachnid (below) is how well it camouflages with the wheelbarrow! Talk about being ready for anything.
Spiders rock, but nothing floats my boat like a good snake. Again, youthful memories of pet snakes—green grass snakes, garter snakes—and of catching snakes. I was the best at that. Still am.

I didn't have to catch this one, though. S/he was found slithering around in the wheelbarrow after I removed one of the bales. A lovely garter snake. Haven't seen many this summer; too cool and damp. They're out there, of course, but they're keeping a low profile.
Between sections of the first bale (these segments being referred to, interestingly enough, as "books"), I found this exquisite young red-bellied snake. I'd never even heard of red-bellied snakes before coming here, but I now encounter them quite often. They are delicate, gentle, shy, and gem-like. I love everything about them.
Both snakes (along with all the spiders) were carefully returned to the hay bale pile, but before doing so, I couldn't resist snapping this glamorous closeup.
Check out that two-toned tongue. Snakes use their tongues not only to taste and touch, but also as a scenting device. It seems the forked tongue allows the snake to determine from which direction a given scent—whether prey, mate, predator, or anything else of interest—is coming from.

Having finished my reverie amongst the snakes and spiders, I found my attention grabbed anew by the subtle, intricate beauty of the cut, dried, and compacted grasses and other herbaceous material that populate a bale of hay. It's the ultimate still life: a segment of field pressed like a flower in a book—a book that tells the history of a meadow at summer's pinnacle—a book that looks, thinks, and smells like hay.

Recent Things

Morning walk.

The web.

Pumpkin.

Hail!
Freaked out rabbit in hailstorm's aftermath.

Fallen moth.

Garlic harvest.
Daisies at the end of their rope.

Blueberries.

A morning walk in the forest.

A Memory, A Wish

There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

—Wendell Berry, from "How To Be a Poet"

One of the best parts of being in the middle of nowhere is the fact that every walk is rewarded with a sighting of something new and unfamiliar.One day, perhaps, it's an unusual caterpillar, pelted (alas) by hail. Another day (yesterday, in fact), it's a lone orchid in the woods or a stand of long-searched-for chanterelles. Today, it was a green heron regally posed at the side of the dead-end road near the neighbor's pond.

When I was a kid at the very wonderful Farm & Wilderness Camps in the Exceedingly Great State of Vermont, I had a memorable and influential counselor named Linda Lee.

Linda was a kindred spirit—a term I almost never use. She was a wise and loving guide for my burgeoning adoration of the natural world.

One August afternoon, while Linda and I were walking in the woods, I mentioned how much I hoped, one day, to see a wood frog—a beautiful species I'd looked at only in books.

Linda said she'd found that, sometimes, by simply asking something of Mother Nature with respect and humility, special creatures would appear or events unfold or requests be answered. Sometimes, she said, you just have to ask in the proper spirit. So I did.

And guess what? Within moments a tiny wood frog with its softly banded, raccoon-ish face and its mushroom-brown body, appeared in the path on which Linda Lee and I walked that unforgettable walk.

I so hope to live to see a day when we can accord nature the respect it—she—we deserve, for as surely as we sink, sell, denigrate, and disparage Mother Nature—from whom (it's only too obvious to say and too easy to ignore) we all come and to whom (hat in hand) we'll soon enough return—we sink, sell, denigrate, and disparage ourselves.

That is why I hope we will take action to resist this latest bit of nonsense from President Cheney and the BushPuppet from Hell, Inc.—because Mother Nature and her growing cadre of endangered flora and fauna cannot issue press briefings, sue on their own behalf, take up arms to defend themselves, hire a lobbyist, or pose for a nauseating photo op with Condi Rice.

It's up to us to decide just how much desecration we're going to stand for—in every sense of the term.

Ant Farm

Two inexplicable habits have take hold this summer: the adoption of a mason jar as my favorite drinking glass and a tendency, weather permitting, to lunch on the front steps of my house, rather than up by the vegetable garden—in a proper chair, a creaky old Adirondack chair—as I have in the five summers I’ve been in this place.

The mason jar has a smooth, thick rim that feels good on my lips, and something about a jar like that conjures thoughts of lemonade, simplicity, and summers past—way past, like before I was born.

But it’s the latter passion that’s the subject of this essay, for here there are no cars going by, no passersby in intriguing garb, no chats with neighbors, no stage-whispered cell phone diatribes, and no public psychodramas, as may be enjoyed (or not) from my stoop in Brooklyn. (Where I—in friendlier, less frenetic, and decidedly younger days—spent a fair amount of time until a prodigious band of house sparrows took up residence near a window sill above my favored spot, literally unseating me with a maelstrom of wayward nesting materials and nefarious effluvium.)

In short, there’s nothing much to be gained from sitting on the front steps of this remote rural farmhouse, except a view of the dog’s muddy water bowl and a two-by-two-foot patch of cement—the only cement around, except for the old barn foundation out back. The view from the vegetable garden up the hill is far superior, with its bee-loud glade of borage and its flowering dill, upon which the wasp-waisted wasps alight with balletic grace.

The stoop is where I’m sitting now, and it’s hard on back and butt alike. But it’s here that lunch is now being served, accompanied by iced mint tea in a Ball jar. And it’s here that I’ve come upon something that easily upstages the dog bowl on my attention-o-meter.

I’m referring, of course, to that inevitable sidekick of concrete, the ant. Cement, ants, and hot summer days—they go together like PB and J, but then ants go with pretty much everything.As a city kid dysphoric with the conviction that I was meant for the farm, attention to sky above and earth below meant awareness of whatever hint of wildlife might be glimpsed on a typical Manhattan sidewalk. Sometimes it was a ladybug or fallen fledgling. Once, I remember, it was a praying mantis—indelible thrill. But, for the most part, in the flat, unyielding kingdom of concrete, ants ruled the roost. I spent hours watching, following, and yes, annoying them.

Ants have continued to hold my interest to some degree over the years; I’ll never forget seeing a seemingly unending line of leafcutter ants marching in perfect single file across the forest floor in a Costa Rican cloud forest, leaf fragments held proudly aloft in their impressive mandibles. But in terms of piquing deep interest, ants have definitely taken a back seat, as it were, to moths, butterflies, caterpillars, worms, and other bugs in these, my “adult years.”
Beekeeping recharged my interest in ants. Honeybees and ants are, after all, the most advanced of social insects. They share much in common besides smarts, industriousness, and good looks—including caste systems, queens, female workers, and exceedingly intricate lifestyles. They also share a sweet spot on the Linnaean roadmap under the order Hymenoptera [meaning hymen (membrane) + pteron (wing)].

So taking my lunch on the stoop now includes watching the ants—at least three different species, if I’m not mistaken—go about their busy business. My observations are of the most rudimentary kind: There’s an ant carrying a blade of grass (what for? food? housing material? a sword?). There’s an ant that seems to be just wandering (scoping out new territory? coming back to the colony after important business in town? looking for food?). There’s an ant staggering under the weight of a much larger, dead ant (an enemy killed? a random piece of food located by chance?).

I watch from above, more distant than I’d like to be, even when, lured by fascination, I find myself down on hands and knees to get a closer look. Always, my vantage point is that of an ill-informed observer with barely a clue about the proceedings, an outsider of astonishing proportions.Not that it would improve my understanding, but I do wish my renewed interest had taken hold a few years ago, when my vision was sharper. Now, it’s all about pulling off my eyeglasses and getting in some true “face-time” with my tiny brethren. But crawling around like that, face to the ground, gets the dog all excited and causes no end of distraction to all concerned.

I have the same wish about my start in beekeeping—younger eyes would have been a real advantage in locating those tiny, all-important eggs deep in their cells during hive inspections. Often, I must content myself with locating larvae, which, being further along on their developmental journey, are big enough to be readily seen. But with the bee-veil and the difficulty of removing eyeglasses with a veil on, important details—and the pleasures of deep viewing—are muted or lost. The answer, I suppose, is to get braver about skipping the veil and better at handling the bees so the veil isn’t quite so essential; alas, I’m not there yet.But let’s keep our eye on the prize here: the manifold fascinations of ant-watching. Try it next time you’re just about anywhere. There are ants in the trees, on the ground, in your backyard, at your picnic and quite possibly hanging around your kitchen.

I spilled a little honey on the porch the other day and within a couple of hours, two big black ants were in serious honey-removal mode right there on the porch—I mean, inside, where never before had I seen an ant appear. Like honeybees, ants are smart. They’re watching you.

Early this summer, I found some ants “tending” aphids on a burdock—a behavior I’d read about with fascination but never witnessed first-hand. Assuming the guise of dairy farmers, ants protect and care for the tiny aphids and then “milk” them to obtain the sweet liquids that exude from the aphids’ bodies. This is symbiosis, ranching, mutualism, and mind-blowing intricacy all rolled up into one, right there, on a weed along the driveway’s edge.According to a new and much needed field guide called Ants of North America, there may be as many as 1,000 species of ants in North America alone. From the introduction:

“There is something profoundly fascinating about ants, even when they are being a nuisance. In large part, this is because they do many things that remind us of ourselves, and have been doing them for over 100 million years. Like humans, ants are social, living exclusively in highly organized societies that evolved originally from family groups (in the case of ants, the group consists of a mother and her offspring). Like humans, ants exhibit a seemingly endless variety of complex social behaviors. Ants were the first herders, agriculturalists, and food storage experts. Some ants fight vicious territorial wars, some ‘enslave’ other ants, and in North America alone, over 20 species of predatory army ants march in leaderless packs on perpetual campaign. On the brighter side, they take excellent care of their mothers and their sisters, and even their brothers and sons—who do little but eat and never help with the chores.”

That last bit, of course, echoes the honeybee approach to living, while the part about predatory army ants “on perpetual campaign” makes me wonder if our quote unquote leadership in Washington might possibly be an abnormally large, badly misshapen, and intellectually inferior species of ant yet to be identified as such and taxonomically put in its place.
Here’s a bit more from the intro to Ants of North America:

“Sadly, few comprehend the vital importance of ants to the ecosystems that sustain human life on this planet. In North America, for example, close to 1,000 species of ants play an essential role in the proper functioning of nearly all terrestrial ecosystems. They are prominent agents in the breakdown of organic matter, nutrient cycling, soil turnover and aeration, seed dispersal, seed consumption, and plant protection. If ants went on strike and ceased their ecological services, the consequences would be profoundly disruptive to the natural world—and eventually tragic for humanity.”

Talk about an underrated treasure.