As I mentioned earlier, Sandy and the girls took a trip to the South Dakota Badlands in June 2021.
On the evening of December 9, 2021, Sam and I were sitting in the living room reading our books, when I heard a noise from outside. “What’s that?” I said. “Is it the neighbor’s kids?” Sam listened a bit, and said “No, I think it’s a cat!” So we both immediately looked for our cat, and there she was, coming across the room looking intently at the back door with her tail like a bottle-brush. And then we heard the cat crying again, and it wasn’t her! So Sam went to the back door, opened it, and saw a startled cat suddenly dash off into the black locust stand beside the house. Now, by this point, it was dark and we already had close to a foot of snow on the ground, so it wasn’t really practical to pursue the cat into the brush. So we put out a bowl of food for it so it would hang around until we could come up with a plan.
read more…Sandy and the girls took a trip to The Badlands in South Dakota back in June 2021. I didn’t go with them (I had some work I wanted to get done, and somebody had to look after the dog, cat, and chickens), but they took some pictured for me. Like these pictures of cactus blossoms that they took on June 18, 2021.
read more…Now, I am not 100% certain that these are all the same species, since I didn’t actually keep the littlest one and raise it to adulthood. But, I think that it is pretty likely that they are. So, this first little feller was in our house on August 15, 2020:
I have it on good authority that “Hollyhocks are the single prettiest flower grown on Earth.”[1] And we have some growing right next to our front door. They certainly have a long blooming season, they started flowering sometime in mid-summer, and the last few blossoms were still there on October 5, 2021.
Way back in 2011, we bought some praying mantis egg cases to hatch out and raise. Those were Chinese Mantids, Tenodera aridifolia, which is the species most commonly sold for pest control. But, as we found out, they require about 6-7 frost-free months to hatch out and mature, which means that they can’t survive year-to-year in most of Michigan (and certainly not up here in the Upper Peninsula). However, there is a species of mantis that is native to Michigan, at least downstate. This is the Carolina Mantis, Stagmomantis carolina. These are the ones that I used to find sometimes when I was a kid in Livingston County. It turns out that, while these aren’t as readily available for purchase as the Chinese Mantids, it is possible to purchase their egg cases online if you look for them. So, that was what we did. I put them in an aquarium with a screen lid and moist straw in the bottom, and they hatched out on June 5, 2021
I’ve been seeing this growth at the top of one of the maples west of our house for some time, and now that the leaves have fallen off of the trees I was finally able to get clear pictures of it on October 31, 2021 (Halloween).
We found this bug nymph on July 4, 2021. As I recall, the girls caught it in a jar so they could show it to me.
It is clearly a nymph, since it hasn’t finished growing its wings. From its general body shape, it is definitely a true bug, and it is almost certainly one of the stink bugs in the family Pentatomidae
So, as I’ve mentioned from time to time, I keep bees. And one of the recurring issues with honeybees is dealing with the varroa mites that infest them, and that eventually will become so numerous that they kill the hive. I last posted about my difficulties with them way back in 2007, and so I thought it would be good to revisit the topic.
Back on August 14, 2021, I checked for Varroa mites in my hives by using a variant of the “Powdered Sugar” method. Basically, what I do is take the hive apart, put each hive box onto a piece of butcher’s paper, and then sift a cup of powdered confectioner’s sugar over the top of the frames in the box. The bees get completely covered with sugar, and immediately go into a frenzy of grooming to get it off. This dislodges many of the mites that are present, which then fall down onto the paper along with some of the the sugar. After about 15 minutes, I take the hive boxes back off of the paper and restack them into a hive. Then I brush the sugar off of the paper into a bowl, add water to dissolve the sugar, and any mites present float to the surface of the water where I skim them off and count them. Here is one of them:
I found this one tangled in my arm hairs after I got back from a walk in the woods on August 16, 2021. It was extremely tiny, small enough that to the naked eye it was little more than a black dot – maybe 2 millimeters long.
