Category Archives: Wandering

Infrequent Fliers and Various Window Views

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When the worker bee hatches she does nursery duty before progressing to guard duty at the entrance:

However they failed to stop the Carpenter Bee (big as a Bumble Bee) from almost drilling a 19 mm (3/4″) dia hole in the top honey box.

This is the view (thanks to Google) the honey bees inside would have had as Carpenter almost got through but obviously thought better when sighting the many honey frame workers, on the defensive no doubt (I’d love to have witnessed it):

I did have other window views:

Flying in Phoenix earlier this month was dry, turbulent and with lightning as soon as we entered this heavy dust cloud:

Other Arizona views were very dry:

I had the impression that thin meandering muddy river was responsible for the faint line of cloud.

A dammed river was the only other sign of water:

Landing in San Francisco once again provided that great view of the colorful old salt flats at the South end of the Bay:

Driving home from Detroit I saw a strange dark whispy cloud over the edge of Lake Erie:

I think that is the Mayfly, which I have seen close up before.

When I got home one was waiting for me on the window – a happy sign of summer coming:

Another flier found on my unused x-country ski trail was this beautiful Black Swallowtail butterfly:

The big attaction this month is the many bugs at Magee Marsh where migrating Warblers of many varieties stop to eat before crossing Lake Erie on their way North.  The birds are tired and hungry. Amazingly you can be close enough to even take cell phone photos despite the many bird watchers:

And just as though prompted by Darrel’s recent question as to what happened to the larva photo I had put in the blog last June, the bug, which had been in a pupa state encased in wood shavings for nearly a year, finally emerged. Now I need to know its name (it’s about 20 mm (7/8″) long)???:

The beetle was very glad to quickly scuttle back into the crack in the Catalpa tree where I’d first found it, after living for the last year and a half in a jar of damp wood particles.

Signs of Life in Stowe Snow

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At what seems to be the end of the shortest winter I can remember, we drove last week to the North-East, and up a thousand feet, for 13+ hours. The very pleasant Von Trapp Lodge in the North mountains of Vermont fortunately had great early March 2012 snow.

The strangest sign of mountain life were the toboggan tracks from some unseen fun-loving four footed animal. The biggest suspect, after much discussion with many locals, is that it might be a Fisher Cat, a local relative of the weasel, on the West coast it is said that it can eat a porcupine.

 

 

 

 

 

The right hand image enlarges the top of the left hand view showing a long glide, a few quick steps and then another long glide. The animal has captured the classic Cross-Country Ski magic motion of gliding – stepping and then more gliding.  Bigger animals just glide along on very old wooden boards: (A hidden spy-cam in the woods took the video in the link below).

You never know who you’ll see in the mountains. There are 100 km of frequently groomed trails, and other wilder ones too. A log cabin high up in the forest shelters an employee who sleeps there for a few nights at a time and serves delicious hot soup to the handful of visitors.

 

At the end of the week the temperature warmed; the snow started sliding off the roofs

and the maple sap started running.

Just outside the Lodge area which only uses traditional buckets, there are  modern commercial sap operations linking the trees with plastic pipe, one way valves and vacuum pumps which look as though they could suck a tree dry. But they have to be inspected frequently because moose often wander through and accidentally rip out the pipes.

Meanwhile, back in the rented house great joy was had around fabulous meals eaten with mountainous appetites.

 

Aphids, Fruit Flies, Bees & Meteorites – Errata, Omissions & Addenda

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1.  I used insecticidal soap which wiped out the tiny black aphids (in my “Jungle In Here” blog) but unfortunately it also eliminated all the orchid blossoms.

2.  For the yellow aphids on the Oleander

 I’m now brushing them off with a fine brush and I have 2 good looking buds.

3.  I’d wrongly blamed my little red wiggler worms for creating the large wine-tasting fruit fly population. I seems that open wine bottles, even with surfactant detergent to discourage water walking, starts an orgy. I’ve no idea where they do it but next day there are hundreds more fruit flies, and all are thirsty.  Simply terminating the test eliminated them all, except for one or two teetotallers on a vase of cut flowers.

4.  One amazingly warm (7 C (45 F)) day last month (Jan.) allowed me to quickly opon the hive to check that the bees still had food:

Now I see I’ve left them too much and could have harvested more but they are all happy, even hatching a few eggs,

and I hope they were glad to see me evict one clump of about 20 small hive beetles.

Now (Feb 11) it’s below freezing, as normal for this time of year, and yesterday they licked, fanned or shoveled the snow out of their doorway all by their sweet little selves.



Meanwhile, last week in down-town Phoenix, I carefully examined street flowers and had only found one single insect, until I discovered white flowering Pear trees with many happy, pollen laden honey bees.

5.  Trying to walk to the Phoenix Botanical Gardens I saw a map location which said “U of Arizona Meteorite Collection”. There I learnt that the body of a meteorite coming in from deep space is very cold despite having a momentarily hot skin for the short time while it hits our atmosphere.  To prove it, the U of A collection has one with unsinged grass stuck to it. So that nullifies the hot rock experiment in my recent “Winter Works” blog, but it does improve the chance of finding one on cold clean frozen lakes because it won’t be hot enough to melt its way through the ice.


And as to their value: the last one above is a ‘Carbonaceous Chondrite’.  Bruce Draine’s “Physics of the Interstellar ..Medium”, p. 267, says that about 1/10 of 1% of the weight of that type is composed of Nanodiamonds! Unfortunately a nanodiamond is only about 2 nanometers across (about 1/200 the wavelength of blue light) so don’t expect to see any sparkle.

Scott F. has a good idea for finding meteorites: watch for a-typical stones when snorkling over flat sandy sheltered bays. They might lie there for a long time before getting covered.

Meanwhile I continue to check flat roof tops of taller buildings. These days they are often covered with light grey sheet plastic roofing material rather than the asphalt of old. Apart from bird droppings there is very little granular material up there.

Please let me know if you find one?