Monday, January 2, 2017

2017 Project Goals

Due to setbacks this past year I wasn't quite able to get out any new ant or bee related videos, at least not of a decent length. I have footage but it's not really enough to call an episode and barely enough to call a segment of something bigger. So for this up coming year I hope to get more footage on a variety of topics to flesh out these segments.

A Video of Wildflowers
I grow a number of these in my yard and they're beautiful though my yard isn't the prettiest setting for a video, hence a lot of my macro heavy photos of them. I'll also likely be visiting the Mt. Cuba Center for more material on this. I may even title the video Wildflowers of the Mt. Cuba Center because that place has been nothing but brilliant inspiration.

Another thing I'd love to do one year is set out baits at the Mt. Cuba Center to see what species of ants they have in the woodland gardens. They are technically gardens but mostly planted as a woodland setting in sweeps to look somewhat natural. So it's not really simulating a garden but also not really simulating nature as we'd find it; it's something all its own in a lot of places. So I think that would be neat do a quick survey of. (I doubt they'd let me chop into logs and things for the more cryptic hunting species but these don't have much to do with "living" plants anyway.) 

More Myrmecochory updates.
My wildflowers has been flourishing the past couple of years with small patches of it growing to look slightly Mt. Cuba-esque. Several new plants have started to sprout as a result of ants planting the seeds. It will only truly be rewarding for me when some of these plants make it to a flowering age, such as the very young Trilliums that have started coming up but we're still a few years off from that. 

Exploring A Rotting Stump.
Almost a decade ago we had a Norway Maple chopped down and reduced to a waste high stump. It's now teaming with life including some rather hard to find ant species. I'd love to film more of this and do a video about it to show you all.

Lastly over this past year I started walking my dog at a different time of day. And I found out that just by doing that I was finding all sorts of ant species having nuptial flights, often with queen ants and males landing directly on me. One thing about the hobby a lot of people don't seem to get is just how easy it can be to find a queen ant. I'll admit though it does take some devotion. I might get a new point and shoot camera just for this task.

Anyway those are my 2017 goals. I hope I'm able to bring them all of them to life in the coming year.