BEES AND POLLINATIONS

You might remember my coverage of the giant spiderweb that ate Texas in 2007.  For Halloween 2010 I am happy to report for your creeping-out pleasure that a new giant spiderweb was recently reported in Maryland!

Greene, Albert; Coddington, Jonathan A.; Breisch, Nancy L.; De Roche, Dana M.; Pagac, Benedict B. (2010). An Immense Concentration of Orb-Weaving Spiders With Communal Webbing in a Man-Made Structural Habitat (Arachnida: Araneae: Tetragnathidae, Araneidae). American Entomologist, 56 (3), 146-156

The giant web was inside a waste water treatment plant, an open building covering almost 4 square acres.  And “immense” doesn’t really begin to cover it.  From the paper:

“We were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior.  Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was was nothing less than astonishing.  In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose.”

Remember, that paragraph was written by 5 mid-career professional entomologists and arachnologists.  If they were a bit freaked out by the size of the web….Well, you can draw your own conclusions.

One of the amazing bits of info in this paper was a quantification of just how much of this facility was filled with web. As you can see from this data table, in several areas over 95% of the space was filled with spider webbing.  The webbing was so dense that it actually pulled some of the 8-foot long fluorescent light fixtures out of place!  The authors also measured the number of individual spiders per cubic meter–and got up to 35, 176 spiders/m³ in some areas.

Oh, and the authors describe their estimates of total web volume as “markedly conservative” and “representing a minimum volume” (emphasis mine).  OMFG, indeed!

The researchers also mentioned the giant Texas spiderweb in their discussion, and suggest that giant multi-species webs may be more common than we realize.  Yay!

BTW, one of the authors on this paper also authored a recent paper on gigantism in spiders. I mention that mostly to  have an excuse to link to Kingdom of the Spiders.  William Shatner + Giant Spiders = Epically Bad Movie WIN!

(also, am I the only one that thinks that torch placement is….unfortunately suggestive?)

Filed under: Entomology, Science, WTF Tagged: araneae, OMG, spider, webs
(więcej…)

My Father, Thomas Brian Meehan, aged 33yrs old in 1956 at` Patunga`, the sheep farm he eventually managed for ten years, on his trusty steed. At this stage we were living in the little cottage in the background, moving to the main homestead ( which deserves a post of it`s own) 2 yrs later.
The land is very steep in that part of the North Island of NZ, it once was covered in native forest which was milled, consequently when ever there was heavy rain alot of it slipped down into the valleys and creeks below ! It also took tons of super phosphate fertilizer to grow decent grass, with many farmers walking off their land in the early 1900`s before aerial topdressing was used. Dad had 2 horses he rode and a pack of working sheep dogs that went everywhere with him – both horses and dogs being his work mates and loyal companions. I never saw my Father mistreat an animal, he did swear at them which was the only times I ever hear him cuss, but it was not in his nature to be cruel.
With his tanned fit body, a long piece of supplejack and very sharp knife in a pouch at his side, he was ready for anything – my hero !

(więcej…)

Hives Wrapped for Winter October 23
Uploaded by WesBeek. – Explore more family videos.

The video above documents my beekeeping activities last Saturday.

(więcej…)

It’s been over a week since I have fed either Blue Heron or Valerie’s hives – I decided to take care of that today so I went with Julia to Blue Heron before I went to work and to Topsy at a break after lunch.  Here is the process of making the bee tea and the feeding of the hives.

I put a slideshow up because I am now including both chamomile and thyme from my garden in the bee tea.  Interestingly, the hive at Blue Heron had only used half of the baggie syrup and almost none of the pint jar in the Boardman on the interior.

I wonder if they have run out of storage room?  Or if the aster blooming in the fields is meeting their current needs?  Or if I hadn’t cut long enough slits in the baggie or had clogged holes in the jar lid of the Boardman?  I cut longer slits in the baggie and changed out the pint jar for a jar with a better lid.

We’ll see this weekend when Julia and I revisit these hives to do a final consolidation for winter.

(więcej…)

via youtube.com
I’m not quite sure what to make of this ad, especially the hilarity at the end… but I suppose it might have some sway over the masses who poured big bucks into Cameron’s coffers…

(więcej…)

Here’s an inspiring tale of a crazy/passionate/bizarre/creative/extreme effort to save an endangered species – the Northern Bald Ibis: teaching captive-hatched young ones of the species their…

(więcej…)

Bird Hunted To Near Extinction Due To Infuriating ‘Fuck You’ Call via theonion.com
The perils of maladaptations… or adaptations that turn out to be mal in the human world! Posted via email …

(więcej…)

via youtube.com
This seems to be the season for documentaries on the education system in the US, what ails it, and how we might fix it. You’ve probably heard of „Waiting for Superman”, the…

(więcej…)

Bug Rating:

I always get books from the library, mainly because I really don’t like spending money when I don’t have to. (Some call this being a “cheap bastard”. Personally, I consider it “wise frugality.” )

Sometimes I check out a book and immediately know it’s one I want to buy to keep. Truck is one of those books.

By page 10 I had already found a bunch of things that I thought “I should save that for the blog.” By page 20 I was wishing I had written the book.

To give you a flavor:

” I tend to garden on impulse and intuition. Apparently there are better ways. If my raised beds have any consistency, it is that they are anemic and squirrel-riddled. My garden gives me inner peace and salad, but it also yields cat turds and wilt.”

and the painfully true:

“Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.”

It is superficially the story of his plan to rehab his International Harvester 1951 truck; it is actually the story of a life in a rural town and love; love of gardening, attempted love of women, and love of the human condition.

[repost from 2007, because I'm missing my garden and wanted to add the Bug Rating]

Filed under: Books, Gardening
(więcej…)

(więcej…)