Hibernation

When keeping ants people have it idea that Hibernation is absolutely necessary. They blame this on the fact that most queens fail. Actually I've the same amount of queens eventually fail that have been hibernated as the ones who haven't.

So here are the facts as I understand them.
The earth's rotation around the sun is elliptical, not a perfect circle. So when winter comes the earth is actually farther away from the earth. This means ant activity even in the tropics slows down, but relative to the temperature in the area. As you go farther from the equator it gets colder and colder and you find ants that have more seasonal habits. Hibernation is done specifically to survive the cold temperatures.

So here's the thing though. We have a few species in America such as Lasius neoniger that is found in areas where they do not need to hibernate, and they do hold multiple nuptial flights multiple times a year. Where colder climates occur though they hibernate like all the other ants, but when they hold these always hold nuptial flights in August or September. But this begs the question Why? Why send out their young queens in a time when the cold of winter is only two months away (longer than then it would take for a colony to get up and running).

For this question I don't have an answer but I suspect it's lead lots of people to think Hibernation is required. Another possibility is the European influence. People in Europe take this hobby to all new levels. They have places like Ant Store selling setups I'm very interested to try out someday. Sadly though they don't ship to the US and it would cost a minimum of $50 to ship last time I checked.

Now I don't mean to put the people of Europe on to high a pedestal. They're taking way to much advantage of their nations' lack of importation laws, or at least they're not following them. But that's another topic.

In Europe they have a species called Lasius niger that seems to be very similar to our L. neoniger. But in Europe they are under the influence that you HAVE GOT TO HIBERNATE THEM! I read things like Queens will shrivel up and die, they'll never lay eggs, or they'll just die after first workers. And I've got to say this sounds like every queen that I've ever had that failed. Not laying eggs, and dying after first workers are things that happen to queen ant normally. A 1% success rate tends to be true, hibernating or not.

So here's a few things I'd like to point out. Lasius niger and Lasius neongier are different species. For Geographical reasons though Lasius neoniger has access to semi-tropical environments where Hibernation isn't needed. I don't know the distribution of Lasius niger completely but it seems to me you aren't likely to find it in Egypt or anywhere in Africa. The tip of which is on par with the US states Florida and Georgia.

So while Lasius niger probably has a much higher success rate with a period of cold, out US. Lasius neoniger at least has a few populations where it's not needed. And the genes for these populations tend to circulate their way slowly upward. And I believe that's why I find things like Lasius neoniger queens who lay their eggs well before hibernation. And with a little feeding do just as well.

Actually I've had quite a few colonies be successful with No hibernation at all. Solenopsis molesta, Crameatogaster cerasi, and Camponotus chromaiodes all don't require hibernation to start a colony. Now that is not to say they won't die later of something like flooding test tube, workers not foraging, or some other catastrophe. But apparently hibernation isn't "needed" to start a colony, at least not for all ants.

Socks in my Pollinator Garden, Oh My!

I was reading the Courier Post this morning (I think the one from today) and they had an article in there called "Pollinate/Keep insects in the garden," by Matt Chimento. So a couple of things caught my eye.

First off they recommended Butterfly Weed, Milkweed, Black-eyed Susan, and Cone flowers.

Second Lorraine Kiefer, owner of the Triple Oaks Nursery and Herb Garden in Franklinvile commented. "If a gardener doesn't garden naturally, it is very hard to keep pollinators. The homeowner is not qualified to have dangerous pesticides. The bottom line is that people need to garden naturally, make the garden conductive to butterflies or honey bees."

I have to say I'm impressed with her statement. I'll have to check out Triple Oaks in person next year. All good sound advice so far... but then,

Debbie Kearns, owner of Jones Nursery in Williamstown, also subscribes to the natural method. [b]Kearns recommended soaking a sock in sugar water, then freezing it. "If you freeze the sock and hang it outside, it starts to thaw and lets off the scent of the sugar."[/b]

At this point I threw up all over the page at the thought of our bees taking in "sock honey."

Mason Bees

So this is a safe time of the year to talk about this I think. It's a time to prepare, and weather you're ordering nesting blocks or building your own. these are a great way to add some pollination to your yard.
Territorial Seeds and Knox Cellar are both places selling nesting blocks and tube cans. I'm sure there are others too but these are the two I've bought from.

Basically these are bees that take advantage of tubes, meaning one entrance hole. The holes are the result of beetle grubs boring out of dead wood. These are active in the spring and summer but they don't live that long. They're also specific to the size hole they like.

It's said that Mason Bees and other Natives are better pollinators than Honey Bees. I find this questionable at best. Sure they use Buzz Pollination (where they use their wings to force the flower to produce more pollen and nectar) but they're only alive for 4 to 6 weeks. That might be good for plants blooming at that time of year but good luck getting a stock of Mason Bees active all year. Most Ground Nesting bees hold similar lifestyles. But even then, 4 to 6 weeks of the year the adults die off and they won't be back until next year.

Mason bee homes are easy to make. Just drill into lengths of wood. Stay around the drill bit size 5/16 and you should attract a variety of species.

The best part about these bees is they are timid! I've never been stung by one ever, even when doing macro shots of them up close.

Have You Seen Me?

Ladies and Gentlemen this is the Honey Bee, Apis mellifera. I find it very annoying how I can go to a website such as BugGuide.net and find people who have posted pictures in their ID request section of the Honey Bee. Going back to their home page a second (assuming they haven't edited their page as of this posting,) there is a full color picture of Honey Bees!

Now it is understandable that some people out there just aren't sure of their ability to identify insects. And for those people it's perfectly fine to seek a second opinion. Still though, I find it hard to believe people don't know what they are. Is there honestly anyone in America who hasn't seen the Honey Bee?

Now something that might be confusing is all this killer bee nonsense. Africanized Killer Bees are the exact same species, the difference is their variety grew up in Africa and only the strongest hives survived. Before modern day beekeeping practices were perfected the only way to get honey from the hive was to destroy it or leave it incredibly vulnerable to attack. So the strongest hives in this case were the ones that drop everything and launch a full attack on whatever was looking at the hive funny. Compare this to some European varieties where stinging just isn't done. I'm a member of a beekeeping club and it's astounding. We'll have a meeting every few months and almost always we'll open a bee hive up. We smoke the thing properly, open the hive and start passing around the frames which make up the hive. Not only is no one wearing a bee suit but no one has been stung at any of our meetings for the past year. (Why aren't my hives like this!?)




Yet another possibility is that some other bees look similar to honey bees. But even in this picture I would think the difference is obvious. The other bee here has way more hair all over it's body.














So that leaves me with one other possibility. Maybe it's just that people rely on color to much. Apis mellifera has maybe 3 or 4 main color patterns. And all can be present or mixed within the same hive. Because the queen bee mates with multiple males it's common to see more than one color pattern represented. Here you can see a few individuals in a hive that have more pronounced darker stripes, while next to them are ones who barely have any visible. And around them are something in between this. It's actually possible to find honey bees with full black abdomens and others who have full orange/brown.

I see people starting to turn over a new leaf with all this Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) going around. They're listening to the ads out there and planting plants for the environment. It's great to see people helping out but I'm left to only conclude that no one cared enough before to really learn why bees are important... let alone what they looked like.

Shopping Frustration

So last night I decided to shop for the plants I want to order in the spring and see how much it would cost. Here is the list as it stands.

Lupinus perennium for flowers and butterflies.
Prunus serotina (cherry tree) for flowers, butterflies, fruit, and birds.
Lindera benzoin (spicebush) for flowers and butterflies.
Fennal and parsley for butterflies and herbs.
Birds foot violet for butterflies and flowers.
Salix humilis (willow) for butterflies, flowers, and nesting for birds.
Dutchman's pipe (vine) passable a carnivorous plant, but for butterflies.
Native Honeysuckle (vine) for butterflies, flowers, and hummingbirds.
New Jersey Tea (eastern lilac) for butterflies and flowers.

So it's a hefty list and I'd love to plant them all. But I went shopping online last night for them all and couldn't find one place that sold them all. If I ever come through with the native plant club I'm going to start my own garden nursery to make sure there is a source for all these.

Helping a Friend

While working a few weeks ago I found my manager's project for her college level Biology class. It was a bunch of leaves glued to sheets of paper. I recognized a few of them and said their names aloud. My manager suddenly turned to me, "You know what they are!?"

Apparently the project was to identify 50 plants native to New Jersey. This made up something like 25% to 30% of their final grade. Initially the teacher had taken the class out into the woods and pointed out the necessary leaves and small plants they'd need that would be the standard 50 plants to identify. As a rule they could add as many plants as they like and if correctly identified as native to NJ they'd be added to the 50 plants needed to achieve a 100 for the project. The trouble is NOTHING in their education upbringings had prepared them for this project. I don't even think anything in the Biology class itself was geared towards helping with this project. The only resource they had was the teacher himself who would at least tell them if they were correct or not.

To my manager's benefit she'd already ID'd maybe half of the plants but was having trouble with all the others. There I couldn't help her because most of them were trees and I'm not good with those just yet. I know a Birch tree has white bark but couldn't tell you what the leaves looked like. But thankfully she's able to add any number of native plants to her assignment and I happen to have a garden filled with native plants. So I basically showed up to work one day with a trash bag of yard waste. Granted they were all properly labled.

Now you might be wondering why doesn't everyone just go to the garden center and take clippings from all the plants there? Well that would only work if they'd gone to a native plant nursury. Most garden centers get their plants fromt he ornimental indusry which has been importing plants from eveyrwhere but our native forests since America was founded. Almost all of the plants in my garden I had to buy thorugh special order.

Back to my manager's project I was able to obtain for her 22 properly labled and identified species native to NJ. And I could have gotten her more if she'd told me this earlier in the year. Three weeks ago everything in the garden wasn't in the best shape, right now it's all down to a dormant state. I still have to do some yard work too.

So the end result, sofar, is she got an 86 and we're both thrilled about that. Most of the plants I handed in were corretly ID'd but a few I had to just lable as the genus. (e.g. Hyssop sp.). I don't know if he accepted all of these but it makes me feel good for some reason. It's not fair for a teacher to say 1/4 to 1/3 of your grade will be determined with something you've no experence with. At the same time it's not fair that stundents should be so unprepared, the use of species and genus names should have been included in classes all throughout their edgucation. It's as if some sort of propaganda campain of ignorance were trying to erease them form history. Imagen if no one was taught about World War II.

So maybe I shouldn't have helped my manager out but of course I had to ask how well did the rest of the class do. Well it turns out the majority of the class didn't do it. They got a zero! A small minority got 40's and one girl got a perfect 100. That one girl is the hope for all humanity in my mind. Now everyone has the option of rehand in their project to get a few more right. I have every faith in my manager getting a 100 herself. I imagen a great deal of the class will be betting that one girl who got a perfect score for help.

Why so many Fails though? Why did so many of her class mates, (in a BIOLOGY CLASS!) not bother to prove they know what a Genus and a Species are? I recall when I was in Biology class we at least learned what a species was. We learned how they're classafied too. What we never really learned though was taxonomy, we never really had any examples of keying out a species. I believe if more classes had emphases on doing this task students would have a better knowlage of this sort of thing. It would be great if every chapter either started or ended with a key to identifying somesort of organism. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Environmental Sustainable Native Something

It feels like I haven't posted anything for a little bit, and for good reason. Before Thanksgiving I had a small electrical fire. No damage done, basically the extension cord powering my computer started bellowing out smoke, so I've had to move my operation down to the living room where I'm comfortably typing now.

I'm still going ahead with my plans to start a Native Plant Club and still toying with ideas for names. So far Native Yard of New Jersey or Environmental Gardens sound like the best one. There is a Native Plant club already in the state but they're widely based up north. Also sadly ALL of the links on their site that offer information on endangered or extinct species (and even completely lists of native plants) are broken! Go see for yourself.
http://www.npsnj.org/

It's not that I don't have faith in them at all. I don't know them, I'm not in contact with them. I just hope they're one of those organizations with big dreams but don't have the money to pay for and update a proper website. This actually happens a lot and a website with a good design can be very expensive. A simple 5 button (meaning 6 pages) can cost $1500 with the cost for yearly hosting and domain name renewal negotiable. You may be thinking well I'll just create my own website and I say "Good Fucking Luck!" Of course the 15 year old living next door might have a better offer but think about how responsible and experienced they'll be.

So my other choice for a name was Environmental Gardening and I was shocked to find one website actually had this as a catagory for a form of gardening. Actually a few website do this but it's strange that they also include "Native Plant Gardens" and "Sustainable Gardening" as separate categories. These should all be the same thing. Sustainable and Environmental gardens should be almost nothing but Native Plants! A few exceptions would be plants that are used in place of natives that also aren't invasive.

Here is an example: America only has 3 or 4 native species/varieties of Apple tree (Malus) but the 300 to 400 or so other species/varieties are all alien species brought with us from Europe or specifically bread here in the US. The native apples still exist in the wild but aren't regularly farmed... I believe because they don't taste as apple-like. But here's the thing. The thing is all apples (as far as I know) are still usable by our native moths and butterflies as host plants. My non-native Snowdrift Crabapple tree can still be used as a host plant. Also it's tiny crabapple (berries?) can be eaten by birds. It's also a nice looking landscape plant because the small red berries stay on the plant. A number of shrubs do this too where the fruit stays on the foliage well into the winter. They remain there becuase the berries don't taste good but birds will eventually eat them as all the better tasting berries get eaten first.

You could argue they aren't native and displacing the native apples but at least these aren't bad for the environment. This turns into a simple matter of protecting a 3 to 4 species instead of removing a keystone that causes irreperable damage to the echosystem.

I Have a Dream

I've decided to start my very own club/organization. Though I'm not sure how formal it's going to be yet. I'm gearing this towards environmentalists, scientists, and avid hobbyists of all things nature. Basically I want to take what Doug Tallamy has written in his book "Bringing Nature Home" and use it as the underlining philosophy for a gardening club. I don't want to target life long gardeners because these are stereotypical grandmother-ish people who really buy into the ornamental industry. Because I know it's hard for people to change old habbits I think traditional gardeners might not appreciate certain undertones I've been known to emphasise.

Here's an example. The ornamintial industry has been promoting a landscape that is starving nature to death. Plants that are sold as Pest Free are the most useless plants in the world. It doesn't matter if bees are pollinating the flowers, or birds are eating the barries or even nesting in the branches; If it isn't native to US soil it's part of the problem. The fact that bees love the flowers to some of these plants and birds are spreading the seeds around are exactly why. This is a nonnative plant that our native insects can't eat or control, occasionally they'll be brought in with a disease our native varieties don't have an immunity to. We don't need these plants in America because we already have natives that do this alread. Far to often do we see a forest destroyed to make way for development, and when they find erosion to be the problem instead of planting native varieties that were doing the job towns turn to the ornimental industry and plant nonnative weeds.

Somewhere along the way Native plants were seen as ugly. I have no idea where this notion came from. The beauty of plants will vary no matter what part of the world you're in. It's our native plants that are targeted by butterflies and used as host plants. The damage these caterpillars do can be extensive but I've never seen this kill a tree. Our native trees are well adept to regrowing all their leaves. When people see a gypse moth tent they tend to spray them on sight. But I say let them be. Think about how much money is wasted putting birdseed into birdfeeders every year. In a healthy environment we have perfectly good controles for most pests. People look at the epidemics happening to farms (a very fradgile and unhealthy environment due to it's monocrop) and think it could happen to their backyard too.

The club I intend to found will be one to promote hearloom trading of native plants. I plan to grow them in my yard, collect the seeds, and grow them over the winter. Club members should attempt to do the same and we can trade and share what we grow. Maybe even sell them as a fund raiser, though I don't know what we'll be using the money for. I don't believe charging money will be nessessary either. This brings me to my second gripe.

Charaty organizations! I don't want to say they're bad, no no no. By all means a lot of them do good. But I don't believe what any of them are doing is enough. I'm sure the money going to plant a tree is doing some good somewhere but it's kind of faceless when you think about it. You're giving money to a website and in good faith this is doing some good ... somewhere. I think it would be a better method if people were to take this into their own hands. Instead of paying someone else to plant a tree, Why not plant one yourself? A native one of course. This way you can enjoy it! You can make a home for a bird, you can save an endangered species of butterfly, you can beautify your landscape is so many ways if you'd just do some research. If you went well out of your way to plant Milkweed in your landscape you could easily produce a Monarch Butterfly. I planted 4 plants myself two years ago and both years I've had a Monarch hatch out.

Berries slow the Development of Cancer

Strawberries, Raspberries Halt Cancer in Rats

This is from 2002 but I found it to be a good read. Makes me happy I have a few Raspberry plants out in the yard. The thing is though that of 8 plants and only 4 of them producing readily I'd say I only get a hand full from them a week. That's not a whole lot and many I toss away because of slugs and a certain type of fly that feeds on them. They're not real pests and don't really harm much but I still with I got more.

Winter Caterpillars

Woolly Bear caterpillars are on the move. Pyrrharctia isabella is one of the more commonly seen over wintering caterpillars. They're one of the few caterpillars that can eat virtually anything, but oddly enough only take short nibbles here and there. Much of their time is spent wondering aimlessly.


Once winter occurs they will hibernate usually under logs, in leaf litter, or under the bark of trees. Come spring time they can be seen wondering again but are less common than in the fall time. The resulting moth is just brown and doesn't really seem very special.


Hypercompe scribonia, or the Giant Leopard Moth as it's called, is probably the second most common one crawling around now. They're also mistaken for Woolly Bears because they almost look the same. The difference is that Leopard Caterillars are a little bit bigger and don't have the red/brown stripes we see on Woolly Bears.

Giant Leopard Moths are actually very pretty. You've probably seen them if you're living in the easter US and Canada. They're an all white moth, somewhat furry or feathery, and have black spots all over. They're worth googling.