Book Time: GARDEN REVOLUTION

As I started thinking about getting ready for holiday guests and Thanksgiving feasts, I realized that I had a pile of books on our dining room table that were there to remind me to write about them.  It's a pile that's been slowly but steadily growing for quite some time now - and I was somewhere between shocked and dismayed to realize that, in that pile, I had amassed 6 books with gardening as their theme.

So I've pulled them out and arranged them in the order that I read them, in the process realizing that one book had been added to the pile without my actually having read it.  Oops.  Wrong pile.  (Yes, sadly, I have many piles of books around the house.)  So let me get busy with the first of the remaining 5 books in my dining room table pile.

Without further ado, here are my thoughts on Garden Revolution, by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher, Timber Press, 2016, which I read about a year ago, in November 2017.....

Subtitled "How our landscapes can be a source of environmental change",  Garden Revolution truly amazed me.  I've been interested in gardening for and with wildlife for decades now and I have read a lot on the subject.  I am deeply interested in the environment and in ecology.  Not surprisingly, I've done a lot of hands-on gardening and landscaping for wildlife over the years.  Native plants are my "go to" species in planting my yard and its individual gardens.  Truthfully, it's rare for me to find a book with a really new spin or a new series of concepts on any of these subjects - but that's exactly the sort of book I found as I delved into Garden Revolution.

Larry Weaner is a landscape designer who specializes in ecological restoration AND fine garden design.  One of his early insights as he worked in garden design was "...a traditional garden is like a beautiful car with no engine.  The body is sleek, the interior is plush, and the stereo sounds great, but the owner will always need to push it up the hills with bags of fertilizer, weeding forks, and watering wands."  Weaner works WITH nature, in truly amazing ways, to develop beautiful, continually changing, living landscapes.

Working with nature....  What, exactly, do I mean by that?  Before, I've always just meant avoiding pesticides and using native plants, while trying to match the plant species to its preferred growing conditions and hopefully creating habitat for wildlife.  Weaner takes it so much further.  He pays attention to the seeds found in the "seed bank" that is present in every soil, adds in seeds for species that will help succession move in preferred directions, plants small clumps of wildflowers as seed sources to allow for natural spread, and has many other techniques to nudge natural processes in ways helpful to gardeners and landscapers.

Presented in large format with lots of photos, Garden Revolution at first gives off a vibe almost like a "coffeetable book", but it's much more than that.  There is background information, both historical and biological, presented conversationally so that it doesn't overwhelm.  From Weaner's decades of work, there are examples of gardens from large estates to small suburban gardens, discussed in the text as well as illustrated by gorgeous photography.

Using aggressive native species to outcompete problematic invasive species.  Planning and planting for seasonal and successional niches instead of just planting a "once in time" landscape plan.  Cutting weeds off just below the surface instead of pulling them out by the roots and disturbing the soil.  The new ways of thinking about garden design, preparation, planting, and maintenance just keep coming in this book.

Want to help nature and our planet's ecosystems in a very basic, personal, and satisfying way?  Want to help yourself have a thriving landscape with less work?   Want to attract wildlife to your surroundings?  Read this book.  You'll be glad you did.

Dollarweed - What Good Is It?

Talk about a plant that everybody loves to hate!  Dollarweed (Hydrocotyle sp.) is a native plant, also known as pennywort, that loves to grow in the same conditions that also favor lawn grass:  bright sun, plentiful water, low surrounding vegetation.  It's hardy and it requires essentially no care.  With its single, round, silver dollar sized leaves, it is easily recognizable and it boldly stands out in a mass of linear grass leaves.  As such, dollarweed has gained great notoriety - heaven forbid that a non-grass plant disturb the carpet-like splendor of a lawn!

If you look at dollarweed simply as a plant, however, it's really rather attractive.  The bright, shiny green leaves reflect sunlight and are held aloft on pliable, sturdy stems. 

The flowers are umbels of white that are not glamorous, perhaps, but that are quite attractive in a quiet, lacy way.

 This photo shows how the umbels open up as they get older.

This morning, as I took photos, the insects I found on these flowers in a garden bed were tiny ants.  Truthfully, I didn't even see the ants until I opened the photos up on my computer screen.

Perhaps dollarweed's biggest flaw as a garden plant is that it doesn't tend to form solid mats but, instead, prefers to interweave through other plants, refusing to stay neatly in one place.  It's also difficult to completely eradicate from a lawn or flower bed with underground rhizomes that break off readily at each node. 

Because it's a native plant, I've wondered how dollarweed fits into the ecosystem here, but I haven't taken the time to really study it.  All I've noticed on the plant in my yard is an occasional leaf miner.   I'm not sure what insect is doing this particular leaf mining - the larva of a fly? of a moth? of a sawfly? of a beetle?  Any of these different types on insects have certain species whose larvae are leaf miners, feeding on the leaf tissue between the upper and lower surfaces of leaves.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed a closeup photo of the bloom of dollarweed on Instagram.   Responding to the photo, which was identified only by the scientific name, presumably to minimize automatic knee-jerk negative responses, I commented on my interest about how this plant worked in the ecosystem.  The poster replied back with a list of Hymenopterans (bees, ants, and wasps) that had been observed by scientists in 2015 on dollarweed flowers at Archbold Biological Station here in Florida. (See note below.)

Here's the list "floridaplants" sent, comprised of 10 solitary wasps and one native bee.  As you scan it, be sure to note the prey that these wasps use for feeding their young: orb weaver spiders, beetles, flies, leafhoppers or planthoppers, leafhoppers, flies, flies, flies, moth caterpillars, and moth caterpillars.

Episyron conterminus posterus - a spider wasp specializing in orb weavers to provision their nests
Cerceris blakei - a digger wasp that provisions its nest with beetles
Ectemnius rufipes ais - a square-headed wasp that nests in dead wood, provisioning its nest with flies
Epinysson melippes - a solitary wasp that provisions its nest with leafhoppers or planthoppers
Hoplisoides dentriculatus dentriculatus - a sand wasp that provisions its nest with leafhoppers
Oxybelus emarginatus - a prong-backed flyhunter wasp that provisions its nest with flies
Tachysphex apicaulis - a square-headed wasp that provisions its nest with flies
Tachysphex similis - a square-headed wasp that provisions its nest with flies
Leptochilus acolhuus - a mason wasp provisioning its nest with moth caterpillars
Parancistrocerus salcularis rufulus - a mason wasp provisioning its nest with moth caterpillars
Halictus poeyi - Poey's Furrow Bee, a small native bee in the sweat bee family that provisions its nest with nectar and pollen

Wouldn't it be great to get some free, round-the-clock pest control in your gardens?  Especially pest control that specializes in controlling some of the insects above without, at the same time, killing praying mantids, honeybees, or monarch butterflies?

Well, you can have exactly that sort of pest control - IF you leave dollarweed and other small, flowering plants alone in your lawn, instead of treating them like public enemy #1.  In fact, this sort of situation is why Greg and I don't use chemicals on our lawn.  If it grows low, is generally green, and can be mowed, we let it be.  Because of their relationships with native pollinators, I prefer to have native plants as weeds in my grass - rustweed and some of the sedges, for example, as well as dollarweed - but it's almost impossible to have native broadleafed plants without also having non-natives, so we "live and let live".  

The only one of the insects in the list above that I've knowingly observed in my yard is the native bee, Halictus poeyi, Poey's Furrow Bee, shown in the photo above on Gaillardia and identified on BugGuide.net.  Coincidentally, it's the only one of the insects on the Archbold Biological Station's list with a common name. That doesn't mean the wasps aren't an important part of the natural web of nature, too, it just means that people haven't paid a lot of attention to them.  They're generally small.  They're not very colorful.  They don't bother people. Until recently, it's simply that nobody has paid much attention to them.  Generally, scientists often don't know which species, exactly, each wasp specializes in utilizing as prey for food for its larvae.

What a shame that we've ignored these important parts of the ecosystems in our yards and gardens...but what an interesting chance for everyday gardeners to help restore the balance of nature.  Literally as well as figuratively.  Best of all, this ability to help restore Earth's ecosystems is as easy as refraining from using chemicals on our lawns.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.


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Note:  According to the Instagram poster "floridaplants", self described as a botanist, this is the list of wasps and bees that were observed nectaring at dollarweed, Hydrocotyle umbellatus, at Archbold Biological Station in Florida.  The scientific paper (?) is Deyrup, M.A. and M.D. 2015. Database of observations of Hymenoptera visitations to flowers of plants on Archbold Biological Station, Florida, USA.  Unfortunately I haven't been able to get a copy of this database online, so I'm going out on a limb here and assuming the information is accurate.  After all, it's not like many people have the interest or ability to make up a list of scientific names like this.

BugGuide for the Win!

A big thank you and shout out to the folks at BugGuide.net for their help in identifying so many of the little beasties that I see in my yard and gardens! 

Last week was a perfect case in point.  I saw a large black bee nectaring on swamp milkweed from my kitchen window and I grabbed the camera to get a few photographs.  This insect was new to me,  but it reminded me of a bee that had been recently talked about and shared in a Facebook group about pollinators.  So I looked up the two-spotted longhorned bee, the species in question, and it looked good...but maybe just a little different from what I was seeing. 

The abdominal spots were smaller in my individual than in many of the photos of the two-spotted longhorned bee in BugGuide and the long hairs on the legs of my individual were dark, not light, but otherwise it looked like a reasonably good match.  There are really a limited number of large black bees it could have been, excluding bumble bees, which this wasn't.  So I tentatively identified my photos and submitted them as an ID request.

Within a day, Dr. John Ascher had identified my specimen as a southern carpenter bee (Xylocopa micans), a species that I was totally unfamiliar with and had never even considered. I actually thought that the eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) was the only large carpenter bee in our area so I hadn't thought to look more closely at carpenter bees.

According to the brief research I did, there is not much known about the life cycle of the southern carpenter bee.  A fact sheet from the University of Florida reports that the only nests that have been reported were in small branches of Ligustrum (1958) and red maple (1975), about 1-1.5 m above the ground.  Apparently this species is NOT an economic problem, as the eastern carpenter bee can be.

Was this an earth shattering identification?  No.  But the only other way I know to really identify many of the insects I photograph, including this one, would be to catch them and kill them, then look at them under magnification, using keys.  While that is certainly the classic way to deal with insect identification, I am gardening on less than 0.4 acre in the middle of a suburban development where new assaults seem to occur daily against the wildlife present.  Trees and shrubs are cut down and replaced with chemical-soaked lawn.  What flowers there are come from the big box stores which, around here, means they are full of neonic pesticides.  There are far more non-native plants than natives in everyone's yards, providing little food for native insects and other animals.  Often I only see one individual of a species in my yard - and, if I collected it to identify it, I might have just kept that species from keeping a toehold around here.  For example, I have not, to my knowledge, seen a southern carpenter bee here in the 3 years we've lived here - and I haven't seen another one since I saw this individual a week ago.

Why do I find it so important to know what the various insects are in my yard and gardens?  I ask myself that question on a pretty regular basis, wondering if I'm wasting everyone's time, including my own.  Then I identify a new species and learn about it, finding out that I have...

... a wasp species (Prionyx parkeri) that controls short-horned grasshopper populations and pollinates flowers...

... or a fly species, tiger bee fly (Xenox tigrinus), that parasitizes carpenter bees and balances their populations...

... or yet another syrphid fly whose larvae eats aphids.  (The syrphid fly larva is the large, brown and white blob on the milkweed stem, surrounded by its food, oleander aphids.)

The complex web of relationships in even my basic little gardens truly astounds me, and I learn so much by identifying the different species and researching a bit about their life cycles and feeding habits.   I try to share that information with others, too, hoping to encourage fellow gardeners to just relax and let Mother Nature keep the balance in their yards instead of pulling out the poisons to "keep everything under control".

In fact, thanks in great part to the insect identification help I've received from BugGuide, I've come to think that human "control" is highly over-rated and much more likely to do harm than good, especially in a garden.  What insects are YOU seeing in your garden, and what are you learning about the balance of nature all around you?  Have you dared to go chemical free yet?

A Recent Cast of Characters in My Gardens: Pollinators and Predators

With the initiation of several days of rain, it seems like a good time to share a few garden photos from the plethora I've taken over the last few weeks.  Since I'm obsessed with pollinators and other wildlife, that's what I'll generally be showing you!

Gaillardia (Gaillardia pulchella) brings in a lot of insect activity.  I have several pots of gaillardia on our back patio, as well as a few plants along the street by our mailbox.  Not surprisingly, most of my photos are from the plants I see most often - the ones near my back door.

This is a lousy photo, but I wanted to share the single bumble bee (Bombus sp.) I've seen in my gardens so far this summer.  Gaillardia is the ONLY flower I've seen her on so far.

A female monarch (Danaus plexippus) finally visited the yard for several days last week and she left several eggs behind.  Here's she's ovipositing on a swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) I planted a couple months ago.  I'm a "survival of the fittest" biologist, so I don't collect the eggs and raise the caterpillars inside;  I'm waiting to see if I see any caterpillars - this photo was taken on the 28th, so there should be a couple tiny babies out there munching away, but I haven't gone looking yet.  (Update:  my grandson and I went out in the rain this afternoon and found at least 3 tiny new monarch caterpillars!  Yeah!)

Ms. Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis) here isn't a pollinator, but I love welcoming her and her relatives into the yard.  Every mosquito this mosquito hawk eats is a mosquito that doesn't bite me! Aren't her eyes particularly gorgeous?  The body of the male blue dasher is a beautiful powdery blue, but I've been seeing almost exclusively females lately.

This green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) seems to have decided that the outside corner of our gutter near the bright lights of the kitchen window makes a perfect home.  Over the past week, I've been seeing her (him?) frequently within just a few inches of this location.   Note:  nothing like a closeup photo to let you know the house badly needs a power washing!

Out front, the newly planted sweet pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia) has excited a lot of pollinator interest.  I shared the potter wasp and the 4 spotted scarab hunter wasp I've seen nectaring here in my recent post;  this is a carpenter-mimic leaf-cutter bee (Megachile xylocopoides) who also has seemed to enjoy the blooms. 

The deep velvet black of this bee's body and the iridescent blue-black of its wings are just stunning.  I wonder if this is the species that has been harvesting circles of dogwood leaves to make their nest cells waterproof?

Another little green treefrog was tucked away inside a Flyr's nemesis (Brickellia cordifolia), hoping against hope that I didn't actually see him as I looked around.  I let him pretend that I hadn't noticed him.....

With the spotted beebalm (Monarda punctata) beginning to bloom, I'm starting to see a little more activity in that section of the garden, including this small green anole (Anolis carolinensis).  I'm still not seeing many insects attracted to the spotted beebalm blossoms, but I did see a hummingbird feeding - even though I didn't have my camera with me so I could visually share with you.

Back to the anole for a moment, I've been seeing many tiny little green anoles for the last several weeks, which just makes me smile.  Obviously it's been a good year for anole love!

Another recent dragonfly visitor was the great blue skimmer (Libellula vibrans), who perched on top of the poles in our tomato pots for a while - and was lucky enough (and good enough) to capture a passing moth shortly after I took the top photo.  Those big, black-spotted blue eyes aren't just for show!

Out front, enjoying the turkey tangle fogfruit (Phyla nodiflora), there's been the phaon crescent (Phyciodes phaon), nectaring - and possibly laying eggs, since fogfruit is their larval plant.  Note:  I don't know if this individual is a male or female.

The fogfruit has also attracted many other insects, including a female blue dasher dragonfly, a carpenter-mimic leaf-cutter bee, several  different species of wasps, bees, and flies.  In fact, the fogfruit is active enough that it's probably worth a post just by itself.  I just wish it looked a little more "gardeny"....

Anoles have been out in the front gardens as well as in the back.  Here was one haunting a summer phlox (Phlox paniculata) blossom.  Sometimes I wonder if I don't see huge numbers of pollinators because I DO see lots and lots of predators around the blooms - and I'm sure it's not a coincidence that they are hanging out there!

Speaking of predators, whether nymphs (like this one) or adults, I'm seeing quite a few milkweed assassin bugs (Zelus longipes) this summer.  I thought they were so-named because they were part of the milkweed community, but recent reading suggests their name comes from their coloration.  I've certainly seen them on many, many plants, not just on milkweed.

The clustered mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum) in the back yard has brought in quite a few unusual (for my garden) pollinators.  Besides several wasp species, there is this grapeleaf skeletonizer moth (Harrisina americana) which has both a common name and a color pattern that make it a perfect Halloween animal.

Believe it or not, this small, colorful, Halloween themed moth, also nectaring on the mountain mint, is from the a group of moths known as bird dropping moths.  Yes, that's an actual common name for moths in the subfamily Acontiinae .  This moth goes by the hard-to-remember name of black-dotted spragueia moth (Spragueia onagrus)  and is an animal I've never seen before in my life.  Kudos to the helpful folks at BugGuide.net for helping me identify this one!

Lacewing larvae, looking for all the world like prehistoric monsters or like some less glittery version of Tamatoa, the Crab, on Moana, are hard to see unless you look closely, but they are great allies in garden pest control.  This photo is blurry (the entire "mound" is barely 1/4" across and I wasn't using a tripod) but, if you look carefully, you can see the huge jaws under the front edge as well as a wing from one of its dinners right above the jaws.

In all, this lineup of characters from my garden highlights 6 garden predators (green anole, green treefrog, milkweed assassin bug, lacewing larva, blue dasher dragonfly, great blue skimmer dragonfly) and 6 pollinators (monarch, bumblebee, carpenter-mimic  leaf-cutter bee, phaon crescent butterfly, grapevine skeletonizer moth, and black-spotted spragueia moth).  During the 10 days that I photographed these animals, I saw many other animals, too.  Some, like the 5 species of wasps that I talked about in my last post, I've shared with you.  Others, like bluebirds, cardinals, bluejays, gray squirrels, chickadees, tufted titmice, house finch, mockingbirds, red-shouldered hawk, brown skinks, southern toads, and Eastern box turtle, I haven't shared.

How can anyone be happy with a statically "pretty" landscape, when a garden filled with wildlife changes minute by minute?!  I love the surprise of going out into my yard and meeting a new insect neighbor.  I love the pleasure of looking at a flower cluster and realizing that I'm looking into the eyes of a little lizard or camouflaged frog.  Each new animal I see adds a layer of richness to the world around me that delights and soothes me.  What an honor to be sharing my yard and gardens with all these other forms of life here on Earth.

This Week in Pest-Controlling and Pollinating Wasps

While I'd love to be seeing more insect life in our yard, I have to admit that I AM seeing some interesting insects - including a few that are totally new to me.  So I thought it would be fun to share what I'm seeing as well as the blooms that are bringing them in.

How to organize this????  By day?  By bloom?  By type of insect?  I'll just have to see what flows best.....

I started out to make this post an overview of all the pollinators I've seen over the week, but it quickly became apparent that would be overwhelming, so I decided to focus this post just on wasps.

Wasps have been quite prominent recently, especially solitary wasps.  Last Friday, July 20th, was when I first noticed some unusual ones -3 in a row, in fact, over the course of about 10 minutes, on the clustered mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum).

The first was a large scarab hunter wasp that has no common name so I've nicknamed it the fuzzy scarab hunter wasp (Campsomeris plumipes).  Like other scarab hunters, this wasp flies low above the ground, searching for (buried) scarab beetle larvae, a.k.a. beetle grubs.  When she finds one, she digs down to it, paralyzes it, lays an egg on it, and flies away.  The egg hatches out and the wasp larva consumes the beetle grub.  One wasp egg on one beetle grub, so every one of these you see means that a scarab beetle of some sort - say a June bug or green June beetle - didn't make it to adulthood.

As you can see, the adult wasp actually eats nectar to sustain itself, as is true for most of these solitary wasps.  Also as solitary wasps, they are not aggressive and they will not sting unless you actively try to handle them or they get caught in your clothing, stepped on in bare feet, etc.  You can assume this is true for all solitary wasps unless someone mentions otherwise.  It's a nice change from the more problematic social wasps.

As an aside, all the solitary wasps I'm familiar with have only one generation each year, so if you take them out (for example, by spraying insecticides), it may be several years before their population numbers can rebuild by migrating in from surrounding areas.  Given how well they function as both pollinators and, probably more importantly, as pest control, that would seem to be extremely short sighted to me.

Back to my magic 10 minutes by the mountain mint, the next insect to fly in, while I was photographing the fuzzy scarab hunter wasp, was the great golden digger wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus).  This is a species I've seen before, both here and in Kansas, and I love its fiery color and large size.  You just can't mistake this distinctive wasp with its red legs and black-tipped red abdomen for any other species.  Look, too, at the golden glow created by the gold hair on its head and thorax.  That's something you almost have to take a picture of to appreciate, although I've seen it highlighted occasionally as one of these beauties nectars. 

Another solitary wasp, great golden digger wasps hunt for and paralyze grasshoppers and crickets as food for their larvae.  The female digs a burrow in sandy soil, with a central, almost vertical, main burrow and individual cells radiating out from this primary burrow.  She places one paralyzed grasshopper or cricket in each cell, lays an egg on it, then seals up the cell.

As I was finishing up my "photo session" with the great golden digger wasp and taking a few last photos of the fuzzy scarab hunter wasp, I noticed more movement in the air space around the mountain mint - a thread waisted wasp had come in to feed, too. 

This rather bizarre looking wasp not only held its abdomen up at a strange angle as it flew, but the sun caught metallic glimmers of color on its otherwise black body and wings.  Researching on BugGuide.net, I identified this species as Eremnophila aureonotata.  Again there is no common name, so I've nicknamed it the gold-marked thread-waisted wasp, "aureonotata" meaning "gold-marked" in Latin.  This solitary wasp species feeds its larvae on a wide variety of (paralyzed) moth caterpillars, utilizing a burrow in the ground, as far as I can tell.

So, according to the time stamps on my photos, in just over 10 minutes my mountain mint had nurtured predators working to control beetle grubs, grasshoppers and mole crickets, and moth caterpillars in my gardens.  Not too shabby!!!  And it didn't cost me a dime beyond the initial cost of a very pretty perennial plant.

I've seen a couple other wasps this week, too.  One I've been seeing frequently for several weeks now is less than half the size of the big guys above.  It's a cute little black mason wasp with 2 white stripes on its abdomen (Euodynerus sp.).  When I grabbed its picture above, I think it was hunting for caterpillars among the ferns.  Again, there is no common name for this wasp, so my description above ("cute little black mason wasp") will have to suffice.  Mason and potter wasps feed their larvae primarily on moth caterpillars, although some species also use the larvae of leaf-eating beetles.  If you see smallish wasps using mud to fill up small holes (for example in brick, where your hurricane shutters have gone up in the past), it may well be one of these mason wasps.  They build cells out of mud in hollow tubes, provisioning each cell with a paralyzed caterpillar or beetle larvae on which they lay an egg before closing up the cell and moving on. 

Do you sense a pattern among the solitary wasps here?! They've found a good gig in paralyzing prey to keep it fresh for their young to eat after hatching, then tweaked the process in a myriad of different ways so that each species has its own spin...and ecological niche.

I've seen these little black and white mason wasps nectaring on blossoms as well as hunting in my gardens.  I've found small holes filled with dried mud, which I presume are their nest cells.  These are enjoyable little creatures for me to notice as I go out and about weeding, planting, transplanting, watering, and photographing.  Just in the last week I have photographs of this species hunting in these ferns, shown above, as well as in camphorweed and in and out of leaves and mulch at the base of phlox and lyreleaf sage.  Front yard, back yard.  Sun, shade.  This little wasp is a "busy bee" in its work habits.

At the other end of the size spectrum from the cute little mason wasp is the gigantic 4-spotted scarab hunter wasp (Campsomeris quadrimaculata) that I've seen a couple times now.  Boy, am I ever glad that these guys aren't at all aggressive, because they are HUGE and they give me pause even though I know they won't bother me.  The photo above shows this big black beauty all coated with pollen from nectaring at maypop flowers (Passiflora incarnata).

Here is a photo I took about 2 weeks ago of a "clean" 4 spotted scarab hunter wasp, nectaring on sweet pepperbush blooms (Clethra alnifolia).   See how much pollen the individual nectaring at the passion vine is wearing in comparison?!  That's what I call a pollinator!

For the sake of clarity, again I've made up a nickname for this wasp as, again, it has not been given an official common name.  Its specific Latin name, "quadrimaculata", means "4-spotted", while the entire genus is known as scarab hunter wasps, hence the "4-spotted scarab hunter wasp".   This is another great predator in the garden, paralyzing and laying eggs in scarab beetle grubs.

Big and little, I've got wasps sharing my gardens that are making life easier - and much more interesting - for me.  I used to hate wasps, but now I smile whenever I see one.  I hope you're seeing some great solitary wasps in your gardens, too.

 

Syrphid Fly Scouting Place to Lay Eggs

In my recent post on aphids and their predators, I shared photos of two types of syrphid fly larvae that I am seeing.  A few days later I was lucky enough to get this photograph of an adult syrphid fly, looking for a place to lay eggs on my milkweed.

If you click on the photo, you can see the details that are not apparent in the smaller image imbedded in the text here.  Note the aphids at the base of the flower cluster?  There aren't a lot and I didn't see the female syrphid fly lay any eggs, so she may have decided that she needed to look for more populous aphid clusters.

Going by the Latin name of Ocyptamus fuscipennis, there is no common name for this syrphid fly.  I am pretty sure that this is the adult form of the "gray slug" syrphid fly larva that I see munching on oleander aphids. 

Here is a closeup of this individual....

(Note:  I have not raised an individual from larva to adult to know for sure, but this is both the most common syrphid fly that I see laying eggs on the milkweed and the most common adult syrphid fly larvae that I see.  Others have raised this species from larva to adult, and the larva does look very similar to this.)

What predators are you seeing munching on YOUR aphids?!

Sand Wasp Grows Entirely On True Bugs

When I first saw this good-sized wasp, I thought it looked a lot like a cicada killer.  I couldn't get very close to it to get decent photographs, but I was able to get good enough images that I knew it wasn't my old friend from Kansas.

Tonight, after I cropped the photos to more closely see the insect I had "captured", I tabbed over to BugGuide.net and started looking around.  After a while, I thought I had probably figured out the identification...but the eye color was wrong and the markings on the thorax were not quite right either.  So, I posted the photos and asked for help.

Meanwhile, I continued searching through BugGuide, looking for a better match to my mystery wasp.  As I was checking out a particular species, a sand wasp that is known only as Bicyrtes quadrifasciatus, I saw a couple photos that looked remarkably familiar.  When I checked my email, I was stunned.  My original identification had, indeed, been wrong;  the species I was looking at now was the correct species; and - most surprising of all - one of the contributing editors at BugGuide had already made the identification and moved my photos to the correct spot!   Those WERE the photos I had just uploaded a few minutes before.

BugGuide for the win!

So why do I try so hard to identify "my" insects to the correct species?  This wasp is a good example.  By learning the identity of this wasp, peacefully feeding at a flower, I learned that I host a species of solitary wasp that raises its young completely on true bugs, on insects like stink bugs and assassin bugs and maybe even milkweed bugs.

Seriously.  This species of wasp finds enough true bugs in the general area of my yard to raise its entire brood of young for the year on the bugs that it finds and paralyzes, drags back to its nest, and lays eggs on.  Isn't that incredible?  Talk about natural pest control.  Talk about the "balance of nature".

To top it all off, as an adult, this wasp acts as a pollinator on flowers in my garden.  Before I started learning about the specific identities of the insects in my garden, I had no idea that wasps were such extraordinary predators or that adult wasps generally just ate pollen and nectar.  Based on a childhood experience, I was actually quite scared of them.  Now wasps fascinate me, and the more I learn, the more fascinated I become.

I am continually stunned by the complex interactions occurring all around me - interactions that I simply don't see or even know to look for.  The natural world is truly a marvelous, intricate web of life whose structure we would be wise to cherish, rather than destroy.

Predators and Parasites on Oleander (Milkweed) Aphids

My milkweeds are hopping these days.  Sadly, I've only seen one monarch caterpillar, but I am still fascinated by all the insect life that I am seeing.  Most of my observations have been on tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) simply because I have several big, healthy plants in pots on my back patio and they are easy to check on and photograph, but I'm fairly certain that what I'm seeing isn't unusual for other milkweed species.

The orange-yellow oleander aphids (Aphis nerii) are common on these plants.  A week ago, when many of these photos were taken, the aphids covered about 2-3" of the top of every shoot.  This week their numbers are much reduced, with just a few hardy individuals remaining where hundreds dined last week.  This is at least the second rise and fall of aphid numbers on my plants this summer.  I'm sure they will go through at least one more population cycle up and down before frost comes this autumn.

So what's keeping the aphid populations from exploding out of control?  If you look closely at the photo above, you can begin to see the answer.  Specifically, here are some of the candidates I've been seeing....

Each milkweed shoot with its covering of yellow aphids near the tip seems to also have at least one or more of these blobs of gray and white protoplasm which, I am pretty sure, are actually syrphid fly larvae.  Although the blobs are stationary when I usually see them, I have occasionally seen one "hightailing" it from one area to another.  Looking on BugGuide.net, this looks like the larva of the syrphid fly, Ocyptamus fuscipennis.  I have certainly noticed syrphid flies that look like these adults hovering around the aphid clusters.  There is no common name for this little fly that I know of, but the BugGuide link will allow you to see what the adult looks like, so that you can notice if your milkweed aphids are attracting attention from this species, too.

Less common, but still easy to find, are these little bumpy caterpillar-like animals that are also, I believe, syrphid fly larvae.  I've not been able to figure out which species or even genus these guys belong to, but I do find it fascinating that two different species of syrphid flies are munching on my oleander aphids!  The only way to really tell for certain would be to raise up some of these larvae to adulthood, which sounds like a fun project when the boys get a little older.

If you ever see a piece of trash seeming to move on your plant, look a little more closely....

You may be seeing a green lacewing larva, which hides under a pile of debris that includes its castoff skins from earlier molts. 

If you look closely in the photo above, you can easily see the yellow oleander aphid being eaten...by the actual lacewing larva at the bottom of the pile of debris.  Lacewings are fierce aphid predators as both larvae and adults.

Not uncommonly among my aphid populations, I will see a dark brown aphid that doesn't move.  This is an aphid mummy.  Tiny parasitic wasps lay an egg in an individual aphid and the developing wasp larva eats out the insides of the aphid, leaving the aphid a literal shell of itself.  Only one baby wasp per aphid, but each female wasp can then go on to lay eggs in many aphids, so aphid mummies are welcome sights on my milkweed plants.

There are other more generalist predators that I'm seeing around my milkweeds, too, which may or may not be preying on the aphids.

I often see tiny, longlegged flies, for example, flying around and landing on milkweed leaves for short periods of time.  Longlegged flies (Family Dolichopodidae) are iridescent green or brown and are known to be predators in both the larval and adult forms.  Although I have never seen one pay attention to, let alone eat, an aphid, I can still hope.  They've got to be eating something!

Clad in the red-orange and black colors of the classic milkweed insect, milkweed assassin bugs (Zelus longipes) are another generalist predator that I see these days, both on milkweeds and on other plants around the yard.  I see the milkweed assassin bugs hunting up and down the plants, sometimes hanging out in the flowers, but just as commonly walking up and down the stems or inspecting both sides of each leaf.  Their eyesight is superb and it can be hard to sneak up on one to take its picture.  At first it will simply duck to the other side of a stem or leaf or flower cluster, but if you persist, it will readily fly away.

The final predator I've been consistently seeing around my milkweeds in recent weeks is a damselfly.  Again, I don't know if this dainty creature is eating winged aphids or not, but I doubt it would turn one down.

So, as you look at the aphids on your milkweeds in horror and dismay, look a little closer - there's a good chance you'll see some other, interesting insects drawn in to the feast that they represent in the animal world!