Unteaching Nature

I've been helping teach a class for preschoolers at the Audubon Naturalist Society. The kids in the class are quite young - I think most of the participants are two - but I've been surprised at how much I have learned from them.

When leading a nature walk for kids that young, it's pretty easy to dominate the conversation. I can point out the differences between a daddy long-legs (or harvestmen) and a true spider (daddy long-legs only have one body part; spiders have two). Or I can teach how to identify a maple leaf versus a tulip poplar (maple leaves look like hands, with five points, while tulip poplars have four points and look like tulips). 

What I can't teach is how to make a child observe nature. I can't teach wonder.

Wonder is fostered by letting the child lead you. Observation is "taught" through un-teaching, so to speak, by stepping back and letting the children lead the way. When they pick up leaves, you can teach them about leaf identification. When they squat on the trail to study a daddy long-legs, you can talk about the differences between true spiders and other insects. 

No lesson is going to be driven home unless the child is engaged. I've learned that you can't teach that, but you can definitely foster it.

Consult Insects Before You Garden

I'm taking Master Naturalist training, and last week, one of the topics was botany. Let me just say that what I've learned about botany is that there's an awful lot I don't know about botany. But during the class, talk turned to native plants, which is a topic I've thought a lot about. In my very teeny tiny front yard, I've been trying to add native plants to the mix. This hasn't been easy, because where I live, native plants generally aren't found at the big box gardening stores - you have to go searching for them. And when you find them, they are quite pricey. However, native plants have their own merits, the most delightful one being that insects love them. Once you have native plants in your yard, you'll start to notice that fewer insects visit those exotic, colorful annuals. Insects have an entirely different way of seeing flowers, which includes detecting ultraviolet designs on the blooms. These UV markings act as a landing strip of sorts, helping pollinators find their way.

What I hadn't realized is that if you want to help the pollinators, you should consult them before purchasing your next plant. This was the advice given during my training, so I went to Home Depot for mulch this weekend and decided to test the theory. There were numerous plants offered for sale in the outdoor "fall color" section. Many were quite colorful, but I didn't see any that were attracting any insects. I started to wonder if the store somehow discourages insects from congregating in the plants when I spotted Joe Pye Weed.

Joe Pye Weed is native where I live and the name stuck in my head after that botany lesson. And I found the insects! All of the bees and flies and other unidentified flying critters that were ignoring the petunias and mums were partying in the flats of Joe Pye Weed. Each plant was literally crawling and buzzing with activity. So I brought a pot of Joe home and planted one in my yard. Hopefully, it will take off, the way the purple coneflowers did. Planting for pollinators may not lead to quite as exotic varieties of plants as you are used to, or give you exactly the color palette you were aiming for. But it is nice to know that you are making the insects happy, one bug at a time.

 

Learning from the fire ant

I saw this great article yesterday with wonderful visuals about fire ants working together cooperatively to avoid drowning - they link together and form living rafts that are remarkably hydrophobic. Engineers are looking to the ants for new ideas in waterproof materials. It was too fascinating not to share with you!

Super Bug!

Little Brother finished his bug project for school today. Can you tell which insect this is?

Like all insects, it has a segmented body (3 styrofoam balls), six legs (3 McDonald's straws, rinsed and cut in half), two antennae (black pipe cleaners), and two compound eyes (pink foam circles with a checkerboard pattern drawn on them). This particular insect also has two wooden chopsticks holding its body together.

Little Brother painted it red because it's a red ant. Did you guess correctly?

Recipe for an Insect

Not to be outdone by big brother Kerm's butterfly sculpture last year, Little Brother is taking his recent assignment seriously. He has to create a three-dimensional insect for a kindergarten class project. I told him to write up a "bug plan" with a shopping list for us to take to Michael's craft store.

Here's his list:


In case you have trouble reading the printing of a 5-year-old, let me translate:

Insect Materials
Glue
Balls of [styro]foam (3 x)
Pipe cleaners (8 x)
Googly eyes (5 x)

I can't wait to see the finished product!

Take the Hexapod Haiku Challenge!

Do you like writing poems about insects? The North Carolina State University Insect Museum wants to hear them!

The Hexapod Haiku Challenge runs through March 20. The contest judges are looking for short poems that celebrate insect life:

"We would love to have haiku, senryū, haiga, and pseudohaiku that feature any familiar arthropod associated with the field of entomology ..."

Visit the contest website for more details. There's a special category for poets under the age of 13. I especially enjoyed looking at this poem about a bee from an eight-year-old runner-up in last year's contest.

Good luck!

Photo credit: carol2chat, via flickr // CC BY 2.0

The Anatomy of the Cockroach

I received a rather unusual email today from Steve Clark which read, in part:

"I wanted to notify you about an educational resource developed by my company Orkin Pest Control. It is a fully interactive virtual cockroach designed to be an instructional tool about insect anatomy."

I visited the website and found it to be rather detailed, including micrographs of every imaginable slice of cockroach. I have to say, it was more than I ever wanted to know about cockroach innards!

And it never before occurred to me that the cockroach might make a useful tool for the study of insects because, as the Orkin Virtual Roach page points out, the cockroach is both a familiar insect and readily available. Think of how cheaply students could acquire supplies for lab class. Folks might even be willing to pay students to collect their roaches. Now that's a win-win solution!

I like the idea of taking this "useless" pest and finding a purpose for it. Good luck, Orkin! I hope that your virtual cockroach has a long and happy life.

Photo credit: Anil Jadhav, via flickr // CC BY 2.0

Make a Butterfly Sculpture!

Today, Kerm and I worked on his extra credit project for school. He had to create a three dimensional butterfly and label the body parts.

The body of our butterfly is made out of three pieces of green foam core: one dome-shaped piece and two circular disks. The proboscis, legs, antennae, and structural supports are pipe cleaners. Kerm cut the wings from construction paper. Our favorite body part, the compound eyes, consist of beads. We anchored the butterfly on a green piece of heavy cardboard and stuck in a few artificial flowers for good measure.


What I liked about this project is that the body was relatively easy for an eight-year-old to assemble and label, once we had all of the pieces handy. But the wings were another story. They were hard to attach and we had to use extra pipe cleaners to support their weight. Kerm hid our ample glue splotches under the "thorax" label. If you try this at home, I would suggest using something lighter for the wings, like tissue paper.


Photo credit: Mama Joules

One Good Thing About Tent Worms

Photo credit: Eden, Janine and Jim,
via flickr // CC BY 2.0
Let's face it: Eastern tent caterpillars, commonly known as tent worms, are a nuisance. And that's putting it nicely. Tent worms can completely defoliate trees (eat all of the leaves), they put up ugly "tents" of webbing in tree branches, and have even been implicated in Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome, a complication that occurs when horses inadvertently eat the caterpillars.

But, tent worms have one saving grace: they make nice pets. My boys like to collect tent worms and put them in their bug habitat, a small cylinder covered with netting.

Photo credit: Mama Joules
Tent worms are fun to watch, since they are active and like to crawl around. They are easy to feed. If Kerm and Little Brother forget to give them fresh offerings of leaves and grass daily, they don't seem to mind. Tent worms tend to get smaller if they aren't eating properly, so it's obvious when you should release them outside (away from your plants!). And, frankly, since they are an insect pest, you don't feel so bad if they die before becoming a moth. Most tent worms aren't as lucky as those in our bug habitat!

An interesting note: I read in several places that tent worms are social creatures. Some folks even described them coming out of their tent in succession, like cars on a train.

Photo credit: Tim and Selena Middleton, via flickr // CC BY 2.0
I wonder if tent worms get lonely and confused living in a bug habitat?

Best of 2009 at Mama Joules

I've been reading a lot of "best of ..." lists for 2009 lately, so I thought I'd recap this year at Mama Joules. See what you think of these posts from 2009:


Best Ideas for Gardeners:

Grow a Science Garden

Heinz Wholesome Memories Intergenerational Garden Award

Take the Lead Out of Gardening

Best Ideas for Mixing Art & Science:

Join the Fun at One Million Giraffes

Make-A-Flake

National Gallery of Art's Lending Library

Neuroscience for Kids (includes coloring pages)

Reuse Those Old Crayons!

Best Interview:

Meet a Beekeeper!

The Intelligence of Bees: Meet a Beekeeper! Part 2

Colony Collapse Disorder: Meet a Beekeeper! Part 3

Learning to Keep Bees: Meet a Beekeeper! Part 4

Best Invention:

Flying Car

Best Opportunities for Citizen Scientists:

Ancient Tree Hunt

FrogWatch USA™

North American Moths Backyard Inventory

Project BudBurst

Best Posts About Animals:

Cricket Ears are Amazing

Giant Frog Gets New Friend - Titanoboa

Venom & Vomit: Meet the Tarantula

Best Posts About Science Poetry:

Meet Scifaiku

Science Poem: Intrasolar Interloper

The Fibonacci Poem

Best Use of LEGO®s:

Kerm's Mars Rover

Little Brother's Mars Rover

Best Post of the Year

What is Global Warming?

Have a safe and wonderful New Year! Be sure to check out these fun ways to add science to 2010!

Photo credit: Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic,
through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license via Flickr.

Ugly Bug Contest 2009

Be sure to drop by Arizona State University's Ask A Biologist page sometime before December 15, 2009 to vote for this year's ugliest bug. Of the ten contestants, my bet's on the cockroach. How can it possibly be losing to the snakefly?

Photo of American cockroach by Drew Avery,
through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License via Flickr.

Last year's ugly bug contest winner was the tick, the blood-sucking frequent disease carrier, who won by a wide margin. You can learn more about the other six contestants from 2008, including the stink bug and weevil, here.

Get into the spirit with these bug-themed coloring pages, which include sheets on bat wing bones, a human skeleton, and the terrestrial ecosystem, in addition to ugly bugs. You can also download your very own ugly bug contest poster (this is a .pdf file).

(Note to self: Eew! They really *are* ugly!)


If you liked this post, you might also like:

Steven R. Kutcher's Bug Art

Butterflies on the International Space Station!

There are butterflies in space! Painted Lady larvae and three Monarch caterpillars are currently orbiting above us, after recently traveling to outer space aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. The "butterflynauts" boarded the International Space Station yesterday.

You can track the progress of the Painted Lady butterflies via Twitter (@ButterflySpace). Teachers can download a free teacher's guide and register for email updates about the mission. There's also a specific thread for teachers on the BioEd Online web board devoted to this experiment.

From the Butterflies in Space website at BioEd Online:

"On November 16, 2009, Painted Lady butterflies [flew] aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station (ISS). The butterflies will spend several months in space as part of an exciting experiment to observe their life cycles and behaviors in microgravity. We invite your class to participate! The butterflies will live in a special habitat, which provides a safe environment, food and water. Photos and video will be transmitted back to Earth and made available here ..."

But Painted Lady butterflies aren't the only insect space travelers this time. Monarchs are up there, too! Through Monarchs in Space, Monarch Watch is documenting the progress of the monarch larvae. You can download some wonderful instructional data from this site along with links to other fun stuff like these recent pictures of the monarch caterpillars in space.

This current set of butterfly experiments builds upon previous work by BioServe Space Technologies, which has designed experiments in space since the early 1990s (including space flights for spiders, ants, and silkworms).

This video describes some of the challenges that the butterflies may face in their new habitat:



Enjoy!

Cicadas are LOUD!

the lone cicada
heralds summer's end
with blaring alarm

Wow! Tonight we saw a cicada up close on a tree trunk and boy, are they ever BIG! And LOUD! I had no idea. I've heard the sound of cicadas since I was a kid, and I have always thought the woods were teeming with them. Now, I realize that a single cicada can have a VERY LOUD song. And yes, this one sounded just like a car alarm. (However, it wasn't quite as big as this lovely sculpture of a cicada in Australia. It just sounded like it.)


Photo credit: Cyron Ray Macey through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Cricket ears are amazing

A department store recently used this fact -- Crickets have ears on their knees! -- to peak interest in an email ad. I thought the claim sounded bogus (can you just picture a little cricket with tiny ears sticking out of its legs?), so I took to the Internet to investigate.

It turns out the ad is correct (my apologies to Kohl's). The University of Arizona Center for Insect Science Education Outreach states in their Cricket Information sheet that when the male chirps, "the resulting chirping sound is picked up by the female's ears on her front legs."

Still, I figured that these "ears" would be simple structures, nothing that would even come close to rivaling the complexity of the human ear. But again, I was mistaken. The book Artificial Neural Networks: Biological Inspirations – ICANN 2005 includes a paper entitled "New Ears for a Robot Cricket". The authors, Torben-Nielsen, Webb & Reeve, state that a cricket has "at least four body openings" used in hearing and describes the cricket's auditory system in this way:

[It] consists of two ear drums ... located on the forelegs and connected through a system of tracheal tubes. One extra sound opening on each side of the cricket body ... is also connected to the tracheal tubes.

In short, the cricket's auditory system is nothing less than amazing. The female cricket uses all of this auditory information to track down the location of the chirping male to mate with him.

Male crickets have an equally complex system for "singing", the noise they generate when rubbing their wings together. As scientist Axel Michelsen explains in the fascinating paper "The Tuned Cricket" (News Physiol Sci 13: 32-38, 1998), "a scraper on one wing hits a series of cuticular teeth on the other". (That's the male cricket's instrument!) The male cricket's wing then acts as a "loudspeaker" to amplify the sound so that the female can hear it. The song is optimized to account for the fact that crickets are low to the ground and the resulting frequency of the vibration ensures that the noise can be picked up and heard by the female.

According to Professor L. C. Miall in House, Garden and Field: A Collection of Short Nature Studies, both male and female crickets can hear:

The male cricket hears the sound which he produces, and the female hears the call of the male.

But only male crickets can sing, a fact I learned from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. They have a nice page about crickets that includes a coloring sheet, the formula for predicting the temperature based upon the number of cricket chirps in a given amount of time, and a recipe for (eeew!) chocolate-covered crickets.

If bugs are your thing, be sure you drop by The Center for Insect Science Education Outreach. Their website has advice for Using Live Insects in Elementary Classrooms for Early Lessons in Life, with lesson plans, information sheets about various insects (including crickets), and tips for caring and raising the little critters.


Photo credit: Larry Page, through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Learning to keep bees: Meet a beekeeper! Part 4

Today, we close our interview with beekeeper Michele Bennett Decoteau, of Blue Hive Journals. (If you're just joining us, here are the links to part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this interview.)

Welcome back, Michele. If someone wants to start keeping bees, what's the best way to begin? Do you have any organizations that you'd recommend for a novice beekeeper?

If you are interested in becoming a beekeeper, the best thing you can do is find a mentor. Check out your local beekeeping organization and start attending classes and meetings. If you are not sure where to find one, call your local bee inspector. Every state has at least one bee inspector in the state agriculture department.

[Note from Mama Joules: Other countries have their own beekeeping organizations, too, like The National Bee Unit in the U.K. Be sure to check your local laws first. Some locations, like New York City, prohibit beekeeping -- not that it stops the New York City Beekeepers Association!]

I also suggest [that] you read a lot. There are many books for beginners on beekeeping. Look for a book written locally because every region has its own variations. I really like Backyard Beekeeping [by C. N. Smithers].

Once you've started keeping bees as a hobby, how much work does it take to care for the bees? How often do you spend working with them? Are you afraid of being stung?

I check my hives weekly from about the end of March through October. Sometimes it is a bit more frequent if I need to do something like change frames around or add medications in the fall. Each check takes anywhere from a half hour to a couple of hours. In addition to checking my bees, I go to the monthly meetings of my local beekeeper's organization so I can learn new stuff.

I love my bees and the time flies. Most of the time I have to remind myself not to go bug them too much! I'd be in the hive every day! Unfortunately, it takes about three days for the hive to settle back down each time I bug them so I try not to disturb the hives if I don't have to.

I am not afraid of getting stung. Getting stung does happen, but it is a reminder to me that I am not doing something right. You don't get in the way of bees doing their job, you move slowly, you take your time, and you don't often get stung. It can be very zen like.

It still hurts to get stung. When you get stung, the first thing you need to do is scrape out the stinger. I find that chewing up English Plantain, a common weed, and putting that on the sting, takes the bite out. Many people say that getting stung from time to time helps their joints stay supple. I have not found that to be the case for me - I tend to swell up where I get stung!

What are the benefits of beekeeping?

Honestly, I just love being with my bees. Working the bees forces you to calm down - it can be quite meditative.

I feel like I am more in tune with my local environment. For example, when the bees were coming into the hive with white pollen all along their backs in March, it took some detective work to figure out that the skunk cabbage was blooming. I tend to be more aware of what is in bloom and for how long.

Of course, honey is a nice bonus along with beeswax. I made beeswax hand cream last year that was great for winter-chapped hands. My goal this year is to try to make lip balm too. Our honey tends to be very light, which is my taste preference.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences of beekeeping with us, Michele! If you'd like to learn more about backyard beekeeping, please visit Michele and her bees online at Blue Hive Journals.


* * *

If you liked this post, you might also like:

Meet a beekeeper!

Meet a beekeeper! Part 2: The intelligence of bees

Meet a beekeeper! Part 3: Colony Collapse Disorder

National Pollinator Week 2009


Photo credits: Jon Mitchell (top) and Nigel Wedge (bottom), through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Colony Collapse Disorder: Meet a beekeeper! Part 3

Continuing our interview with Michele Bennett Decoteau, of Blue Hive Journals, today's topic is Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, a serious condition that is severely impacting honeybees in the United States. (If you're just joining us, here's part 1 and part 2 of the interview.)

I read recently that nearly one-third of the honeybee population died last year due to CCD. What is Colony Collapse Disorder and how can we help save the honeybees?

CCD is a scary new thing beekeepers are facing. What happens is that beekeeper will open a hive and find healthy larvae and honey but essentially no adult bees. Under typical disease circumstances [only a few adult bees leave and don't return and] there is a decline in bees that is reflected in the larvae and honey. Most diseases show their influence in the larvae [not the adult bees]. The question is where the [adult] bees are and why are they not returning to their hive.

I don’t think a single cause will be found. Some suspects are pesticides, pollution, transporting bees, and disease.

Some pesticides disrupt a bee’s ability to navigate home. One potential culprit is Imidacloprid. When bees get a good dose of this pesticide they act drunk – they cannot fly well, they don’t orient to home, and they get lost easily. This pesticide is banned in other countries but can be purchased [commercially] here in the US. (Mama Joules' sidenote: "Imidacloprid and nicotine have similar activity in the nervous system," according to a 2001 "Insecticide Factsheet" in the Journal of Pesticide Reform.)

Bees are also transported around the country to pollinate large crops. First bees pollinate almonds in California, then they go to Texas to pollinate squash, then maybe over to Georgia for peaches and head up to Maine for blueberries. Bees are eating one single crop at a time and are fed sugar water in transit. This doesn’t sound like a good life for a bee to me. For one thing, the queen and larvae get chilled during transport. I think that all this moving around and single crop feeding is a challenge to the bee’s immune system.

Pollution may affect bees in an unexpected way. Bees use pheromones to communicate within the hive and even to some extent between hives. Pollution can disrupt a bee’s ability to smell and [the bee] may get lost [due to] high levels of pollution.

Disease and bugs that bite bees are an ever increasing issue. Many of these pests come from other countries and were introduced into US bee populations from unmonitored imports of bees. Today, beekeepers use a number of pesticides to deal with these bee-pests.

I am a hobbyist beekeeper and generally we are not affected by CCD. Since we don't know what the cause of CCD is, it is unclear why hobby beekeepers don't see it often. Perhaps it is because we don't transport our hives and feed them a single nectar source or stress them other ways. Stress decreases every being's immune system and a weakened immune system might allow some disease to attack bees. Until we know more about what CCD is, we won't know for sure.

Nonetheless, even hobbyists do keep a close watch on diseases and pests in the hive. Essentially we are just big worker bees taking care of the colony!

Michele's top five things we can do to help the honeybees:

1. Become a beekeeper
2. Buy local honey – Check out farmer’s markets and beekeeper’s organizations
3. Plant native plants for pollinators – Check with your local nursery for ideas
4. Grow organically – Stop using chemical pesticides in your flower and veggie garden
5. Buy organic – The fewer pesticides in use in the environment, the better for bees!

Thanks so much for the insight and advice, Michele! Join us next time as we conclude our interview by learning how to start beekeeping (read the next part of this interview here). Be sure to check out Michele's blog, Blue Hive Journals for more ideas and tips about keeping bees.

Michele says, "Take time to try different honey. It’s OK to have more than one jar of honey! Every honey tastes different. I love lavender honey made from lavender nectar."

If you liked this post, you might like:

Meet a beekeeper!

Meet a beekeeper! Part 2: The intelligence of bees

Meet a beekeeper! Part 4: Learning to keep bees

National Pollinator Week 2009


Photo credits: Michele Bennett Decoteau (top photo); Ryan Wick (bottom photo, through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

***

[10/2/09: Updated to include links to the rest of the interview. Deleted phrase "native honeybees" because it is factually inaccurate. Honeybees were imported to the United States.]

The intelligence of bees: Meet a beekeeper! Part 2

Michele working the bees
Today, we continue our interview with Michele Bennett Decoteau, beekeeper and author of Blue Hive Journals. (You can read part 1 of the interview here). Our topic today is bee intelligence.

Welcome back, Michele! I've heard that honeybees are intelligent creatures. Earlier this year, Allie Wilkinson at Oh, For the Love Of Science linked to this article, "Honey bees can count to four", describing research from the head of visual neuroscience at University of Queensland. What do you think? Are bees smart?

Bees are really good at being honeybees. Each bee does her job in response to her environment. When a bee [is born and] emerges from her cell, she will begin cleaning out dirty cells within few hours. She will have lots of jobs inside the hive like caring for the young, grooming the queen, and guarding the hive. When she’s reached a certain age, she becomes a forager. This is a really hard job. She needs to find flowers, gather nectar and pollen, and fly home. Then she has to tell her sisters how many flowers [she has located] and how to find them. Sounds simple, but bees are only about an inch long and can find flowers as far away as two miles! That is a tremendously long way to go for such a tiny bug.

Bees use both visual clues (using their eyes) and olfactory cues (smells) to find both flowers and then find home. I have three hives right next to each other and bees don’t go in the wrong one. They know that their home has its own smell that they can follow.

It doesn’t surprise me that bees can count. They use all sorts of clues to find home and to find food. They use the orientation of the sun, they can tell elapsed time (how long they’ve been gone), and they can even use the Earth’s magnetic fields to navigate. Pretty amazing for a creature smaller than my thumb!

Humans have been using bees for a long time. We love their honey and their wax has special properties as well as a great smell!

I just read an article where bees are being employed in a new way: finding landmines! Just as in the University of Queensland study, scientists have trained bees to associate food (in both cases, sugar water) with other cues. In the Queensland study, they used landmarks. In the military case, they used chemical smells found in land mines. So bees can fly over a field and will hover over areas where a land mine is located.

Michele, that is just fascinating! Honeybees are truly amazing.


Join us next week as we continue our celebration of National Pollinator Week with a discussion with Michele about honeybees and colony collapse disorder (read the next part of this interview here).

***

If you liked this post, check out:

Meet a beekeeper! Part 1

Meet a beekeeper! Part 3: Colony Collapse Disorder

Meet a beekeeper! Part 4: Learning to keep bees

National Pollinator Week 2009



Photo credits: Michele Bennett Decoteau (top two photographs); bottom photograph: cygnus921, through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

***

[10/2/09: Updated to include links to complete interview.]

Meet a beekeeper!

In honor of National Pollinator Week, let's meet a beekeeper!

Welcome to Mama Joules! Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Michele Bennett Decoteau and I am a beekeeper. I’m still a "newbee", having only had bees for about 14 months. I love beekeeping because I can learn new things all the time about bees, plants, science, history, carpentry, and business. I also love the smell of beeswax and honey.


The bee with the green dot is the queen.Michele says, "I name my queen bees and the bee with the green spot is Hope. Beekeepers use a standard color marking on queens - those born in years ending with 7 are yellow, years ending in 8 are red, years ending with 9 are green. Hope was born this year so her spot is green."

I love how much insects can tell us about our environment. As a citizen scientist, I’ve helped catalog the different species of butterflies and dragonflies in Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as participated in Firefly Watch. I am going to participate in a pollinator project next year to see which types of bees come to sunflowers across the United States.

I love bugs so much I used to work at a company called Bugman Educational Entoprises. I got to show kids and adults all sorts of cool bugs from millipedes to scorpions to preying mantids.

What's the difference between a honeybee and a bumblebee? What kind(s) of bees do you keep?

Honeybees and bumblebees are two of many bees found in the U.S. There are many native bees that range from tiny, metallic sweat bees to large, furry carpenter bees. Most bees are female. Male bees generally have one job – to mate with a female bee then die.

I keep honeybees. More specifically, I keep European or Italian Honeybees. Honeybees store honey to give them food to make it through the winter or other times without flowers. Bumblebees also make honey but they only store small amounts. They only need small amounts because only a few bumbles live through the winter – usually one or two fertilized females. Honeybees on the other hand, will have hundreds of bees that over winter with a single egg-laying queen.

Both are pollinators. Honeybees pollinate about 1 bite out of every 3 bites of food you eat. Bumblebees pollinate about 1 bite out of 9 bites of food.

Thanks so much for joining us, Michele! To learn more about Michele and her experiences as a beekeeper, please visit her blog, Blue Hive Journals. We'll continue our interview next time as we explore bee intelligence (read the next part of this interview here).

***

If you liked this post, check out:

Meet a beekeeper! Part 2: The intelligence of bees

Meet a beekeeper! Part 3: Colony Collapse Disorder

Meet a beekeeper! Part 4: Learning to keep bees

National Pollinator Week 2009


Photo credits: Michele Bennett Decoteau

***
[10/3/09: Updated to include links to the remainder of the interview.]

National Pollinator Week 2009

When I learned that June 22-28, 2009 was National Pollinator Week, I immediately thought of the plight of the honeybees (see clip below) and the beauty of butterflies. But hummingbirds, bumblebees, bats, ants, beetles, and even lemurs and skinks can also pollinate flowers. When they go from flower to flower, these critters transfer pollen. This fertilizes the plants and allows them to reproduce successfully.

The U.S. Forest Service Botany Program reports that every third bite of food you eat is possible because of a pollinator. "Pollinators play a key role in the production of more than 150 food crops in the U.S., such as apples, alfalfa, almonds, blueberries, cranberries, kiwis, melons, pears, plums, and squash," according to material provided by The Pollinator Partnership.

So, the next time you see a bumblebee visiting your vegetable garden, or a honeybee buzzing in your flowers, don't be afraid. Just admire them from a distance and let them continue to do their important job.

Caterpillars change colors ... who knew?

Two instars of the Common Mormon caterpillar
(This photograph,taken by Sindhu Ramchandran, is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license).
Recently, my 3-year-old was delighted to find a fuzzy black caterpillar crawling across the sidewalk in our front yard. We took it inside and put it into his brother's bug house, which resembles a tiny pop-up hamper with a zippered lid. Both boys took to feeding it leaves and soon we had an interesting puzzle -- our caterpillar is now turning orange.

I never knew that caterpillars could change colors. Poking around on the Internet, I learned that some caterpillars change color in response to temperature (like the Tomato hornworm)(1). Others are affected by diet and crowding. Some species, like the caterpillars of the American Peppered Moth, can even change color to match their host tree twigs. This ability to hide, known as crypsis, allows them to avoid being eaten by birds (2).

Caterpillars can also change colors when they shed their skin. Christmas Notebook has an amazing set of pictures of caterpillars molting (and then eating their own skin!) in butterfly babies.

Each stage between skin-shedding is known as an instar. Monarch Butterfly and Milkweed Mania has a great set of pictures showing the size and color differences of caterpillars at various instars in Life Stages: (determining instars).

Along the way to learning about caterpillar colors, I found this great page from the Royal Alberta Museum on how to keep butterfly and moth pupae over the winter, advice that just might come in handy!

References

(1)Abstract of "Hidden Genetic Variation Yields Caterpillar of a Different Color" by Elizabeth Pennisi as presented in the February 3, 2006 issue of Science.

(2)"A Reversible Color Polyphenism in American Peppered Moth (Biston betularia cognataria) Caterpillars" by Mohamed A. F. Noor, Robin S. Parnell, and Bruce S. Grant, published online September 4, 2008 at PLoS ONE