Tag: Insects

Cruel Aesop

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , , ,

The last two weeks have been unseasonably warm here in Dunwich.  And believe me I’m not complaining.  Summer-like days and mild nights is wonderful.  Not to mention I must be saving money on heating oil.  And it means we can enjoy the summer activities a little longer.  For instance, the raspberry bushes are still producing fruit.  Not as many as last month but enough to enjoy a treat from time to time.  And I can still go out and take some macro shots of insects and the few flowers that haven’t completely died.  In fact, the wolfbane is about to bloom in the next week or so.  And every night when I bring the dogs out for their final walk, I can hear the crickets chirping away.

And there is an enormous number of them because the sound is everywhere and it is fairly loud.  But at the same time, it has a different sound in the fall.  This is based on the air temperature.  The lower temperature means the sound will be lower pitched and slower.  It’s almost like a power hum that has fallen an octave.

And to my subjective ears it sounds sad and confused.  It’s as if the crickets don’t understand that they are preparing to die.  Unlike Rutger Hauer’s character in “Bladerunner;” Roy Batty, they don’t realize “it’s time to die.”  And that’s exactly the vibe I get when I see the last of the dragonflies moving around the fields.  They’re confused and slowing down and it’s as if their programming is failing.  It doesn’t cover the case where the weather stays warm after they’re supposed to have died from freezing.

It’s also the case of the preying mantises.  They’re still walking around the gardens trying to find food or mates but they’re running out of steam.  Their eyes are already dark and they’re going through the motions but they’re already the walking dead.  Even if I handed them food, I doubt they could eat it.

The only insects that haven’t succumbed to seasonal despair are the honey bees.  They still go around visiting the last living flowers gathering pollen and nectar to bring back to the hive.  And that’s because they have a future and a plan.  They’re filling up the remaining cells in their combs with food to keep the hive going right through winter and into spring.  Their program hasn’t run out.

Now, I am aware that this is just my emotional response to the realities of insect life and its relationship to seasonal variation.  Evolution has crafted the life cycle of most insects in the non-tropical regions to include the death of adults in late fall.  This is the result of millions of years of evolution and it’s a fact of life.  But humans are affected by these facts and have speculated about them going all the way back to Aesop in ancient Greece.  He talked about the ant and the grasshopper that brings up the same exact dichotomy that I see between the honey bee and the cricket.

And humans anthropomorphize these creatures making the ant a hard-working and thrifty fellow and the grasshopper a lazy, hedonistic good-for-nothing.  Well, Aesop was preaching.  While I find the cricket and even the dragonfly sad figures.  After all, don’t we all eventually find our lives winding down?  And even if it is the circle of life, it has a certain tragic aspect.  Well, just a bittersweet reflection on the beautiful Indian Summer that we’ve been gifted with this year.

Honey Bees at the Compound

photog photog's Corner, Science , ,

 

Anyone who has looked at my macro-photographic pictures knows that I like to photograph insects in general and bees in particular.  I find them interesting.

About 25 years ago I established a honey bee hive in my yard.  I did all the things that the books said to do.  I bought the packaged bees with the included queen and installed them in the approved hive with its rack of frames and other accoutrements.  I had the bee suit and the smoker and I fed them syrup and checked on them every once in a while, and they seemed to thrive.  And even though New England winters are awful they survived into the next year and seemed to be thriving.  But after the second winter they were all dead.

This was disappointing.  But I persevered and started all over.  A new hive, new bees and away we went.  But this time they were dead by the next spring.  I read up on what had happened.  Tracheal mites and varroa mites had become the scourge of beekeeping.  Hives were dying off by the thousands.  Eventually chemical treatments became the “solution” for keeping honey bees alive in the Age of Varroa.

But I was unwilling to keep bees that needed to be loaded with poison to survive.  Beyond the question of whether honey produced by semi-poisoned bees was safe or appetizing I just didn’t see the sense in raising creatures that were incapable of surviving on their own.  But I kept an ear open hoping for an announcement of the discovery of bees that were resistant to varroa mite infestation.  Decades passed and I lost track of the whole thing.

But this week I watched a YouTube video by a beekeeper up in Vermont named Kirk Webster (how’s that for a New England name!) who has been raising bees without medication for twenty years.  It was very interesting.  So, this Webster guy lost lots of his bees in the varroa mite plague.  And earlier he lost lots of hives to the previous tracheal mite outbreak.  But apparently, the surviving hives had better genetics and their descendants were able to thrive in the environment that contained these parasites.

And it seemed a big part of the answer had to do with Mr. Webster’s embrace of natural selection.  By allowing the mites to eliminate the weaker hives the stronger bees became the basis of his new stock and they thrived.  And possibly part of that selection was a race of Russian bees that he had adopted during that time.  Possibly bees that had been exposed to the enormous range of climates and fauna found in the vast Eurasian continent gave them a distinct advantage over the European bees.

Well, I warned Camera Girl that sometime in the indeterminate future she might see me walking around the grounds wearing a bee suit.  She shook her head and went back to preparing food for tomorrow’s party while mumbling disparaging remarks about someone or other.  Well, not everyone is as enlightened and innovative as some other people.  But the takeaway is that there are definitely beekeepers who have found success with keeping bees without dousing their hives with insecticides and poisons.  Something for me to think about.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

photog photog's Corner, Photography , , , , , ,

I don’t take many photos of bumble bees because they are so ubiquitous around my yard.  So I don’t pay them much attention. BORING!

But one time I noticed a bumble bee on a flower that seemed interesting.  He was sitting on a flower and not collecting pollen.  So I took a closer look.

 

And what do you know, it’s a robber fly.  Notice the enormous bulbous eyes that protrude above the head.  Look at the long coarse hairs around the mouth and the thick piercing organ sticking out.  Notice the clear separation between the head and thorax.. Finally notice that the back legs lack any pollen baskets that a real bee possesses.

Here’s a blurry closeup of its head and thorax.

I remember reading in a book on close-up photography the author’s respect for the ferocity of robber flies.  He said something like “if robber flies were the size of dogs we would be afraid to ever leave our houses for fear of being eaten alive.  Sounds like a good premise for a science fiction story.

Robber flies come in various shapes and sizes and only a few are mimics of bumble bees.  But they all are ferocious predators and mostly hunt by ambushing their prey.in flight.  And if you are careless they’ll even give you a painful bite if you attempt to catch them by hand.

I’ve found several different types of the robber flies on my property and I find them very interesting.

I was able to get a close look at this one by using the magnified view that my Sony A7 III provides.  That means I didn’t have to get too close to see it.  These things are very skittish and it flew away before I could get close enough to do a naked eye visual.