The Saddest Harvest

This is the third summer I've lived in this house, and it's the third summer I've made the sad collection you see in this jar: dead bumblebees collected from the back part of the driveway near the garage.

I don't think their deaths are natural. The slow but noticeable pile-up of tiny fuzzy bodies starts in early July, long before the cold nights start taking their natural toll on the population, and I maintain two bee baths nearby so it's not likely to be dehydration, either. And of all of my yard, it's only these 100 or so square feet where they accumulate; I'll find the odd dead non-native honey bee or wasp scattered all over the yard, but nothing near the numbers of bumbles in this one spot.

There is the possibility that this neighborhood simply has a lot of bumble bees. I've seen swarms of them on neighbor's lavender, and in my silk tree. The workers only live about a month, and it could be coincidence that I find so many in one spot. Maybe heat rising up from the asphalt happens to catch an abnormal number of weak workers already on their way out.

But I can't help but think it's related to pesticides. We don't use them*, and neither do our immediate neighbors, but I can guarantee that previous owners did. The house was built in 1910, so it's been through every single wave of modern pesticide use, possibly starting with the old fashioned lead or arsenic-based ones, followed by organochlorines, then organophosphates and carbamates, then pyrethroids and neonicotinoids. Most of the most popular pesticides in the last century last a long time in the environment, and could have left potential residues.

We have a curious lack of ants in the house, when many other locals have a huge ant population in their kitchens; we have a lack of wasp nests in the eaves, or under the porch, even this year, which has seen record numbers of wasps due to a mild winter. This probably means the perimeter and eaves were treated with pyrethroids in the last few years. And probably have been annually for decades, since pyrethroids first went on the consumer market. The soil and mulch left from previous owners, surfaces of the asphalt driveway, the foundation and eaves of the garage and the house, all probably have at least some residues of long-lasting insecticides.

Bee declines are more on the public's radar now than a decade ago, but of course everyone wants an easy answer and a "quick fix". The push to to ban individual insecticides like imidicloprid or other neonicotinoids  has the feel of a handy scapegoat, an easy-to-understand boogyman. What the science is clear on, however, is that the single biggest threat to pollinators (and most species, for that matter) is habitat fragmentation. Many of the same people so adamant about banning pesticides maintain pollinator food deserts in their own yards with a traditional manicured lawn.

My opinion is that residential use of pesticides for "frivolous" reasons (killing pests in ornamental plants including lawns) should be a lot more restricted, instead of banning their use in agriculture. At the same time, farmers should be given incentives for increasing biodiversity on their land, and reducing chemical inputs and reducing waste across the board (that includes long distance shipping, burning or trashing harvests when prices go down, etc).

I won't be having my soil tested because my actions would be the same no matter if it's pesticides or other things killing the bees: plant my vegetables in raised beds filled with fresh soil; mulch the heck out of everything else to bury any contamination; keep the bee-baths filled during the driest months; plant native flowers and shrubs that provide year-long food for pollinators, hopefully in a way that is so attractive from the curb I can convince my neighbors to follow suite.

In the meantime, every time I see another sad little fuzzy body in my yard, I get to ponder the follies of modern living.

Image description: A photograph of a glass jar holding about twenty dead bumblebees.

 *With a few, very tiny exceptions, such as fipronil or imidicloprid flea drops on the cat and dog.

References:
https://xerces.org/bumblebees/
https://xerces.org/pollinator-redlist/
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/what-you-need-to-know-about-neonicotinoids/3008816.article
http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-eu-ban-on-outdoor-use-of-three-neonicotinoid-pesticides/
https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder
https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/br/ccd/index/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/north-american-bumblebees-on-the-decline-41344352/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-american-bumblebee-is-crashing-too-293832/
http://npic.orst.edu/ingred/permethrin.html
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/chlordanegen.pdf
http://npic.orst.edu/ingred/imid.html
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/06/04/the-problem-of-lawns/

Interesting wasp nest

In the wall of a fair booth I volunteered to clean out. It's only July 5th, usually you don't see them this big until at least the end of July or August. The nest was mostly inside the wall, with three exit holes on the outside wall, and two exits on the inside. It was probably three feet in diameter inside the wall cavity.

https://flic.kr/p/JF88XG

Baby Mantis

Found yesterday in the garden. About half a centimeter long. Probably a non-native Chinese mantis but I don't really know so back to the garden she went.

Spiders!

Happy Halloween!

Black Widow

Found her on the patio today while I was rearranging some potted plants.






I was a bit sad that I had to kill her. She was just doing her thing, eating some ants and hiding under a pot.









Black widow spiders are ubiquitous in this part of the state. This is the seventh one I've found on my house this summer, and that's without looking (don't tell my husband). If I see them in the front yard I let them live because me and the dogs don't spend much time there. But this one was on the patio where the dogs spend a lot of time nosing around, and I just couldn't take the risk.

An Epic Battle

Mantids are scary. If they were the size of cats, I think we'd be screwed.
I was already a little freaked out by them, with their too-intelligent eyes that follow you when you walk by. Then I had to go and witness this:

I was cleaning the large animal area at work the other day when I noticed three praying mantis sitting together on a fence post. Two larger ones which I assumed were females, and a smaller one, probably male. I admired them for a moment, then continued on with my work. A few minutes later, I glanced over at them just in time to see one of the females take a few steps and leap onto the other female, grasping her thorax. Soon it was a fight to the death. They grappled, biting at each other's faces and arms.

A few minutes after that, I watched the male tiptoe closer and closer to the fight, then finally hop onto the back of the attacking female and start to mate with her as she was killing (and eventually decapitating and eating) the other female. I don't know his fate, because I had to go back inside. But when I came out an hour later, only the (now engorged) victorious female remained on the fence, with a pathetic pile of shredded wings on the ground below her feet.








Nature, red in tooth and claw, indeed.

Peekaboo

This is the reason I got this lens. This beetle is about an inch long. Look at those gorgeous mouthparts.



Whee!

Nom nom

On a recent walk in the field near the apartments, I spotted a flash of iridescent green amid the dead cheatgrass.









It was a chunk of what used to be a bird, feathers with a bit of skin and bone attached. I bent down and took a few photographs, planning on picking it up to try to identify the species. Within seconds, Sammie swooped in centimeters from my lens and snatched the delicious morsel and ran a few yards away. She crunched it down like it was the best thing she'd ever tasted, all the while giving me the paranoid "OMG-mom's-gonna-take-it-away-any-second" glances that dogs are so good at.













So. Can anyone use these two photographs to identify the species of bird my dog just ate?

Season of the Mantis

Every day for the past week at least two of these guys greet me on the stairs in the morning.





(Note the black dog hair stuck to her wing).

What the heck?

They were hanging out on this cheatgrass stem one evening last week. The next morning there were three, and by that afternoon they were gone.

More small things

unexpected road trip

A family member became suddenly and seriously ill last week, so we drove to Billings, Montana in a bit of a hurry. I wasn't even going to bring the camera, but my husband insisted. "We can't spend the whole time at the hospital," he said. "If you leave it you'll complain the whole time."

I'm glad he knows me so well.

Item #1: Urban wildlife around Billings.

A group of Richardson's ground squirrels in an empty lot between hotels and the freeway. I'm not sure where they're going to go when they're ready to move colony because there isn't another patch of grass this size for probably a mile in every direction.

Bunny rabbit, I'm assuming a desert cottontail, outside a restaurant also near the freeway.

Item #2: Pictograph Cave State Park. There are rock paintings. They are old. Also natural sandstone sculptures, nature's abstract art.

Item #3: Plant sexual organs, and them that sexes 'em up.

a new lens

I got a new lens. It is for photographing small things.

Sunday Links

~Humanely move a rattlesnake

~The Big Picture: Animals in the news

~Two historic photos for you today: one photo from 1905: "Bulldog" on the beach with children and one from 1927: Gas Menagerie

~The Pink Dinosaur Project

Ixchel gets a bath

Whenever she's getting ready to shed, I put Ixchel in a tub to soak. She gives every indication of hating being forced to sit in luke warm water for 30 minutes, even though she will occasionally soak in her water dish of her volition.

I'm mean to my pets.

Rubber boa

Charina bottae. Found this fellow during yesterday's morning hike. She* was the exact same color as the banana slug I'd just stepped over and it made me do a double-take. I wish I'd brought my good camera with me (every time I leave it at home, I find something cool to photograph. Why don't I ever learn my lesson?) They aren't rare around here, but you don't see them very often out on the surface, especially during the day.

I love rubber boas. When I was a kid there were a couple of resident ones that lived near our barn. I could usually find them under a certain peice of old plywood, and you could tell the individuals by the unique scarring pattern around their tails. Scars that they get from furious mommy mice. The snakes fend off the parents, who think they're attacking the snake's head, while it gets busy eating all the babies in the nest.

They're odd little snakes. Very docile and slow moving. Easy for a kid to catch and handle. I'm told that they can musk you, but I think it would take some very rough handling for that to happen. They have a blunt tail that looks like their head (or is it that their head looks like their tail?) When I picked her* up, she immediately hid her head and stuck out her tail.





*I don't actually know how to sex a rubber boa.

Resting

Taking things a little slower

Small update

Better photos of that Ceanothus silkmoth from a couple weeks ago.