It’s the start of December – and of meteorological winter – and it’s cold out, and the BugLady is still wondering what, exactly, happened to August. Here’s a little slice of August, from 15 years ago.

The BugLady’s advice for the day is: Find yourselves a big clump of goldenrod and start looking. Bring your camera. Bring a lawn chair. Bring Eaton & Kaufman’s Field Guide to Insects of North America and The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders by Lorus and Marjory Milne so you can find out what you’re looking at. Bring Donald W. Stokes’ excellent A Guide to Observing Insect Lives so you can find out what they’re doing there. You have time – one inscrutable species of goldenrod follows the next, from mid-August through the end of September (botanist Asa Gray once said that the 12 pages devoted to goldenrod taxonomy were the most boring in his book). Each critter has its own story, and it is in understanding the small stories that we start to get a handle on the big picture. 

Worried about pain? The BugLady has been photographing insects for 35 years, and she really, really gets in bugs’ faces, but she has never been bitten or stung in the process (well, except for some peripheral ants, but ants have been lying in wait for the BugLady all of her life). 

Worried about allergies? The pollen of goldenrod is large and is not spread through the air, but its showy flowers take the rap for the very airborne pollen produced by inconspicuous, green ragweed flowers.

What will you see? 

HONEYBEES who, if they start the day on a yellow flower, continue to visit yellow flowers (a phenomenon called flower constancy); 

Worker BUMBLE BEES who can “buzz pollinate” some flowers – set up a vibration that loosens the pollen so they can collect it and carry it to an underground nest to nourish their queen and siblings – with no inkling that when goldenrods bloom, bumblebee days are almost over; 

PENNSYLVANIA LEATHERWING (Soldier) beetles, seldom alone, who visit the flower tops to feed and frolic (count the antennae) and who discourage predators with poisonous chemicals that drip from the bases of their legs;

SOLITARY WASPS catching a light snack of pollen or nectar for themselves while hoping to catch a fellow arthropod to provision their offspring’s egg chamber;

BUTTERFLIES, the most graceful among us, who surround us with magic;

LADYBIRD BEETLES grazing on herds of aphids;

AMBUSH BUG – Insects that are sitting way too still, who may still be in the clutches of a well-camouflaged predator like the ambush bug (here with a Syrphid fly), who grabs and immobilizes them, injects a meat tenderizer, slurps out their innards, and discards the empties;

MOTHS – small, amorous, plain and fancy;

SPIDERS, who catch their prey using tools (an orb-weaver’s web) or ambush (jumping spiders);

BLISTER BEETLES, whose velvety, black coat contains an itch-and-lump-producing chemical that will bug you for a week.  Like the Pennsylvania, they are August specialties;

SYRPHID (HOVER, FLOWER) FLIES that come in sizes so small that their flight doesn’t even rustle the pollen grains;

GRASSHOPPERS AND KATYDIDS, who see us coming and launch themselves into the air with a thrust of legs and wings;

TACHINID FLIES, they of the bristly butts, who lay their eggs on flowers so that their young can climb aboard an unwary insect and eat it from the inside, out.

TIPHIID WASPS, whose larvae prey on soil-dwelling larvae of some scarab beetles like June beetles. The female doesn’t bring food to her egg; she brings her egg to food. When the female wasp locates a grub in the ground), she lays an egg on/near it

They’re all there, and more. Pollinators and predators. The drama of life and death playing out hundreds of times against the buttery backdrop of goldenrod, whose Ojibwe name means “sun medicine.” 

Carpe diem,

The BugLady

The post Goldenrod Watch redux appeared first on Field Station.

The BugLady has been busy, so she’s rerunning this episode from 2009. There are still yellowjackets on the flowers. The photographs in the original episode were (nasty) scanned color slides, and when the BugLady searched her files, she found pictures of three other yellowjacket species, but none of the German yellowjacket. The folks at  have some great shots: , , , and .

German Yellowjackets (GYJs), family Vespidae, are European wasps that arrived in the northeastern US in the early 1970’s and in Wisconsin a few years later. These world travelers are now found on four continents and several oceanic islands. Although the whole bee/wasp/hornet group is often labeled casually as “bees” (and GYJs have earned the nickname “garbage bee”), it’s easy to tell a honeybee from a wasp. Honeybees are hairy, black and tan insects about ½” long; the similarly-sized, GYJs are less hairy and are clearly marked by nature’s warning colors, yellow and black. Both species may nest in walls, but honeybees, which use their hives for years, do not nest underground. 

The nest is started in spring by a queen who has spent the winter sheltered in a crevice, leaf pile, or building. She chews plant material, mixes this cellulose with saliva, forms it into a nest and nursery, and starts . When the first workers emerge, they , care for the larvae and queen, and forage for food. Adults eat insects (live or dead), , nectar and other sweet liquids (including ), and workers bring pre-chewed protein to the larvae.   

Their nests often seem plastered/sprayed onto a surface; these are not the classic hanging, football-shaped nests of the larger paper wasps. The GYJ nest in the glass case in the picture was collected from the front porch of an old building near Mayville, WI; Sherri is holding a typical hanging nest of a Bald-faced hornet/Bald-faced aerial yellowjacket. GYJs often  (the BugLady’s parents had a sizable colony under the cement slabs of their front walk), but many nests are built in sheltered spots above ground or inside walls, and GYJs that nest in walls and attics may chew through your home’s inner walls into the house. Thirty years ago, almost all yellowjackets caught in sweet traps in urban areas were Germans, while those snagged in rural areas were native. But now, this urban, alien species is moving out into the sticks and displacing native species. 

Wasp populations peak in late summer, when a very large nest may contain 15,000 inhabitants. A nest built in a protected spot can remain active into late fall, but the queen and workers will die before winter, leaving a new generation of fertile queens to restart the process. In Wisconsin, nests are not used for a second year (an old nest containing dead workers and larvae makes a great food source for raccoons and skunks). In subtropical climates like California, this adaptable, temperate-zone wasp is establishing colonies that last two or three years and grow to mind-boggling sizes (think pick-up truck size). 

Wasps’ plusses as pollinators and as predators on unwanted insects are canceled by their painful (and, to some people, dangerous) stings and by their inconvenient choices for nest sites. Honeybees have barbed stingers and can only sting once – the act causes their death. For that reason, they are less aggressive away from their hives. Wasps can sting repeatedly, and they have a  both near their nests and away from them. 

GYJs are the “gals” that have been making outdoor eating risky for the past 40 years. Close encounters can be minimized by checking picnic foods and drinks before each bite or sip, avoiding bright clothing and flowery perfumes, keeping garbage cans clean and closed, removing bruised and fallen fruit from the ground in orchards, and refraining from jumping around waving one’s hands hysterically at the sight of a yellow and black flying object. The BugLady knew one teacher who poured a small cup of beverage for the wasps when she took her students outside to snack. The kids were instructed to tell the wasps calmly to go use their own cup.

Sugar-water traps will attract GYJs, but these are more effective in early spring when the queens are foraging.  In late summer and fall they barely dent the population. Removal of a large nest, either above or below ground, is not a job for amateurs; you can empty entire cans of wasp spray into a nest opening with little effect (other than annoying its occupants) because there often are multiple entrances. Call an exterminator.

The BugLady

The post German Yellowjacket Redux appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

As usual, the BugLady’s “Bugs in the News” folder runneth over, so here’s a collection of articles to chew on. Many come from the wonderful Smithsonian Daily Newsletter, which not only posts a lot of good stuff, but it doesn’t put articles behind a paywall. Support your Smithsonian!

THANKS, POLLINATORS –
8 Reasons to ‘Bee’ in Awe of Pollinators by Donna Stockton

SMALL BUT MIGHTY (get in line, Ben Franklin) –
by Sarah Kuta

JUST MIGHTY –
by Rasha Aridi

HOW SPRINGTAILS SPRING –
by Sarah Kuta

SPIDERWEBS TRAP SOUND –
by Krishna Ramanujan

ANTS MAKE MILK –
by Will Sullivan

AND THEY SERIOUSLY OUTNUMBER US –
by Ayanna Archie

BUMBLE BEES PLAY –
by Vanessa Romo

MOTH NAVIGATION (AND ain’t technology grand!) –
by Margaret Osborne

The BugLady

The post Bugs in the News appeared first on Field Station.

Greetings, BugFans,

Isn’t this a pretty bee!!!

When you aim your camera at a bumble bee, which the BugLady does frequently, you expect to see black and yellow in varying proportions (the vaguaries of wind plus the bees’ perpetual motion results in lots of bumble bee shots on the cutting room floor). Four Wisconsin species – the , the , the , and the have slightly different color schemes.

Bumble bees are in the diverse family Apidae, which also includes the Cuckoo, Carpenter, Digger, and Honey bees. According to , there are 47 species in the genus Bombus (15 in Wisconsin). The most recent bumble bee species to be described, Bombus kluanensis, was split from a known species (the “Active bumble bee,” Bombus neoboreus) in 2016 based on DNA analysis and is found only in the Yukon Territory and Denali National Park.

The BugLady photographed this bee on the prairie at Forest Beach Migratory Preserve. Her name is Bombus rufocinctus – the Red-belted bumble bee – and she’s a bee with somewhat northern inclinations plus a few disjunct eastern locations and minus the . RBBBs are bees of open spaces like grasslands, and they also like parks, gardens, barrens, and quarries. They are widespread but not common across their range (they make up about 10% of Wisconsin bumble bee records), and they’re found here mainly in the southern half of the state, though historical data suggest that they once occupied all of it.

The BugLady generally struggles with bumble bee identification, despite being able to photograph them and put them up on the monitor and agonize over them at leisure. RBBBs, with their short, round faces (one source says that they have a “cute, soft gestalt”), are noted for their many (many) color variations – up to 30 of them. “Can be confused with many species,” says the Bumble Bees of the Eastern United States. Here are a few RBBBs with varying amounts of red , , and one with .

Bumble bees are divided physiologically into short, medium, and long-tongued species. RBBBs are in the short-tongued group, which means that they feed on flowers whose nectar reward is not buried deep in tubular flowers. They’re generalists that are found on members of the aster, milkweed, geranium, rose, heath, and pea families, and more. They are good and in some areas are one of the native bee species that are vital pollinators of commercial blueberry crops.

Unlike honey bee nests, the shelf-life of bumble bee nests is less than a year. RBBBs have their nuptial flights in early August, when the colony’s population peaks; males claim territories around nectar sources and watch for queens, chasing intruders that fly past, bumble bee or not. Fertilized RBBB queens create hibernacula for themselves in the soil in fall and are the only bees from the nest that survive the winter.

They emerge from diapause (the term that’s used for invertebrate hibernation) in spring and look for a nest site. Many bumble bees nest underground in abandoned rodent burrows, but RBBBs often nest on and even above the ground, under bark or siding. The queen lays a dozen or so eggs and cares for them herself, and when these workers emerge, they take over the chores inside and outside the nest, and she is restricted to the nursery.

Her eggs are laid in wax cells that are not as tidy as those of honey bees. Workers feed protein (pollen) and carbs (nectar) to the larvae (nice series of ) as successive generations of workers take to the air.

RBBB nests may contain some “ringers.” Cuckoo bumble bees (formerly in the genus Psithyrus and now included in Bombus) take advantage of the labor of the worker bees by invading a bumble bee nest, killing the queen, and laying their own eggs in the nest. A few dominoes must be in place in order for the Cuckoo bumble bees to be successful brood parasites. In an article in Entomology Today titled “Cuckoo Bumble Bees: What We Can Learn From Their Cheating Ways (If They Don’t Go Extinct First)” author Meredith Swett Walker explains: “… cuckoo bumble bees are “obligate brood parasites”—in other words, they cannot reproduce without their hosts. They cannot produce their own workers, they lack pollen baskets on their legs and so cannot collect pollen to feed their own offspring, and they cannot produce enough wax to build their own nest.

Instead, cuckoo bumble bees must find a host colony of another bumble bee species, and it has to be just the right size. Too large, and there will be too many workers defending the nest and the cuckoo will be killed. Too small and there will be too few workers to raise the cuckoo’s offspring. So, cuckoo bumblebees must be selective. They also have to be tough fighters to defend themselves from attacking workers as they infiltrate the nest and kill the host queen. Thus, cuckoo bumble bees are heavily armored with larger and stronger mandibles, a hardened abdomen, and a thicker, more powerful sting.

After it infiltrates a nest, the invading cuckoo must defuse the battle and integrate into the host colony. Some cuckoo bumble bees do this by mimicking the chemical cues used by their host species. Other cuckoos produce few recognition chemicals of their own and then take on the “scent” of the colony via contact with nest materials and workers.

Finally, once hatched, cuckoo larvae must trick the host workers into feeding them. How this works is largely unknown. Previous research by Lhomme suggests that colonies taken over by cuckoo bumble bee queens may lose their ability to recognize outsiders in general and so be more accepting of cuckoo larvae when they hatch.”

Each species of Cuckoo bumble bee targets a few particular species of bumble bees and is similarly colored, and along with the “dominoes” mentioned in Walker’s article, their flight period must sync with that of their potential host species. RBBBs are parasitized by the Indiscriminate Cuckoo bumble bee (B. insularis) and the Fernald/Flavid Cuckoo bumble bee (B. fernaldi/B. flavidus). The first is rare in Wisconsin and the second has been seen here only a few times in 50 years.

Yes, bumble bees can sting, and yes, they will sting, but unlike a honey bee’s barbed stinger that is pulled out when it stings (fatally, for the bee), bumble bees can sting multiple times to protect hearth and home (but not when you poke a camera in their face when they’re on a flower).

The BugLady loves this and even has a paper copy.

Still some bumble bees out there.

The BugLady

The post Red-belted Bumble Bee appeared first on Field Station.