wrz
30
2010
Hello Darwin, my old friend…
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Archive for Wrzesień, 2010
Monthly Archive
wrz
30
2010
Fresno Audubon’s Yellowbill – October 2010 edition
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Fresno Audubon’s Yellowbill – October 2010 edition via scribd.com
Posted via email from a leaf warbler’s gleanings
wrz
30
2010
wrz
30
2010
Drugged to Death – a report on the struggle to bring back India’s vultures
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via english.aljazeera.net
A very nice, if grim, report indeed, for one broadcast on the idiot box. Refreshingly straightforward in this age of excessive hype even on staid old BBC! Of course, this…
wrz
30
2010
The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades
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A bit of art/music for a quiet afternoon. If you haven’t heard of Sufjan Stevens, you are missing out. Part of Detroit’s rich music history, he’s working on a whole series of albums about the midwest. This track is from the album Illinoise.
The biology of the wasp in this isn’t accurate–but the song really isn’t about the wasp, is it?
Filed under: Entomology, Insects Tagged: msuic, sufjan stevens 
(więcej…)
wrz
30
2010
Article: Marla Spivak– MacArthur Fellow
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Congratulations to University of Minnesota entomologist, Marla Spivak on being chosen as a 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow.
wrz
30
2010
Smartweed in Bloom
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Honey can vary widely in color, aroma, and taste depending upon the flowers that the bees are foraging. Flowering plants compete with each other for available insect and animal pollinators. Those that are successful in attracting pollinators are the more likely to reproduce and expand their territory. The plants compete by offering to the pollinators different aromas, flavors, and concentrations of sugars in their nectar. Since honey is made from concentrated flower nectar, the differences in the nectars make for differences in honeys. Flowering plants have evolved to present their blooms to the pollinators at varying times during the year. By staggering the bloom dates, plants are able to lessen the competition for available pollinators. This results in honeys that taste different at different times of the year. Having a continuous series of flowering plants coming into bloom also provides for good honey bee nutrition.
Smartweed, also known as pinkweed, is a prolific flowering plant of the damp ground along ditches and waterways throughout the Arkansas Delta. Smartweed is found around the levees of rice fields. Its pink blooms attract great numbers of honey bees in the early fall. After smartweed is pollinated by honey bees, it produces large amounts of seed which propagate the plant and provide food for ducks and other birds. Smartweed, related to buckwheat, is one of the plants that produce robust-flavored honeys, stronger in aroma and flavor than the light honeys of the spring and summer. Other plants adding nectar to the stronger fall honeys are bitterweed, and fall asters. We consider the smartweed quite a beneficial plant for the honey bees. It is almost always a consistent producer of large volumes of nectar at the time of the year when the bees need to be building up stores of honey for winter. Smartweed was used as a medicinal plant by the pioneers who treated the legs of lame horses and mules with a liniment made by boiling the plant’s leaves.
–Richard
wrz
30
2010
TOPBAR BEEKEEPING WEB SITE
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My new TopBar web page is up and running my fellow TB enthusiasts, check out http://www.topbarbeekeepingnz.com and please feel free to comment ! It is all new to me so I am still finding my way around wordpress, but we will get there, I`m convinced about that – my new motto is . . . . `spread the topbar love`
I will still be posting on Bees in the Antipodes also, so how exciting is this !!
wrz
30
2010
How DOES the queen do it?
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When the queen lays an egg, the egg is like a tiny grain of rice that stands straight up in the cell. She does this a thousand times a day in the height of bee season and her eggs manage to balance on end almost all the time. You can see many examples of her skill at work in the slide below….many eggs, all standing properly on end.
I am part of a Foxfire-Mountaineer festival in Rabun County on Saturday – it’s at the Old School Community Garden behind the Civic Center in Clayton for anyone who is in the area and wants to stop by. I’m giving a talk for children at 11 and 2:30. To talk about the bees, I thought I’d make a model of what a frame looks like in the hive. I’m copying something my friend Jay made to use in demonstrations.
Well, I thought I’d make eggs and larvae out of Skulpy clay (baked in the oven) to show what they look like. Truly this project takes me back to the days of my children’s science projects for school – they were always involved with foam core board, clay, dyeing fabric with walnut shells, etc.
To create the egg, first I tried using rice. I put grains of rice, with a dollop of glue on the tip end into the nut cups I’m using for cells and for the life of me, they wouldn’t stick and wouldn’t stand on their ends. How DOES the queen do it?
Here we see a fallen-over grain of rice.
In this blurry picture I am trying to hold the rice upright with a toothpick while the glue dries to no avail.
Finally I settled on baked clay eggs but even they, larger than the rice, wouldn’t glue and stand up on end, so I had to concede that the queen has a special talent that I don’t and made a round clay bed to hold the eggs upright.
Thankfully this morning all are still standing. I am going to redo the board so that it isn’t square but is rather shaped more like the rectangle that a frame of brood comb is.
For now, this is what it looks like:
As per Jay’s example, I have capped brood, capped honey, pollen and larvae. I’m going to put polyurethane over the larvae to be the liquid in which they lie and in the empty cells at the top to be nectar.
Don’t you love the bee? I found it at Michael’s just sitting on a shelf waiting for me to choose it!
wrz
29
2010
At least 45 beautiful reasons to vote Yes on Prop 21 to save California’s State Parks
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via youtube.com
I hope my fellow Californians (those who can vote!) will step up to the plate where our legislators have failed, and vote to pass Proposition 21, which seeks to provide a protected…
