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.
On September 1, 2021, I had just finished breakfast and was getting ready to clear away my dishes when I noticed this extremely tiny jumping spider on the edge of my cereal bowl. He was just about the size of the head of a pin.
I was down at the transfer station[1] dropping off a couple of weeks worth of garbage on September 11, 2021, and happened to notice that the patch of lawn next to the building was full of rather attractive little yellow flowers.
Continuing the series “tiny insects crawling on my daughter’s arm”, on August 28, 2022 Sam came in the house and wanted to know what the practically invisible speck crawling on her arm was. We thought at first that it might be a springtail, but it was only about 2 mm long and impossible to see details with the naked eye. So I fired up the macro camera, ran the lens up to 3X, and got a few shots. And here it is:
On August 13, 2021, Sam came up to me with something extremely tiny on her arm, so small that it wasn’t quite possible to make out what it was with the naked eye. So, I ran my camera lens up to 3X magnification[1], and got some pictures.
For most of the summer, Sam has been finding this toad on our front porch when she goes out at sunset to lock up her chickens. So, I finally got some pictures of it on August 27 2021.
She named it “Inevitable”, because it is always there, even though most nights she picks it up and moves it to the garden off to the side (because she’s afraid that otherwise someone might step on it).
On August 23, 2021, we decided to check out the “Peepsock Trail”[1] at the east end of town. It turns out to be a nice little trail across some reclaimed stamp sands. It even has a long bridge that cuts across the middle of a pond. At the extreme end of the trail, where it is close to the beach, we spotted several of these flowers:
Back in 2014, I posted some pictures of japanese beetles that we found in the lower peninsula of Michigan, at Sandy’s parents’ place. At the time, I commented that I had not seen any of these beetles up here in the Keweenaw. Well, as of August 11, 2021, that has changed. Here are a bunch of them that I found on one of the “wild”[1] rosebushes on the Michigan Tech campus.
This deer fly tried to bite me on June 30, 2019. When I killed her I didn’t mess her up too badly, so I decided to get some pictures of her.
I am pretty sure that this is the same species I posted back in 2012, but last time I didn’t get the pictures until after the eye colors had faded. This time, she was sufficiently recently-dead that the colors were still pretty vivid.