domingo, 22 de abril de 2018

Comparing Moth Nights at Mockingbird Nature Park

These new collection and umbrella projects are pretty interesting, and I've been trying them out with some of our Indian Trail projects. With our Moth Night coming up on April 27 at Mockingbird Nature Park in Midlothian, I've set up projects for all our moth nights at Mockingbird and grouped them in an umbrella project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mockingbird-moth-nights
It will be interesting to compare the observations!

Publicado el domingo, 22 de abril de 2018 a las 08:39 PM por cgritz cgritz | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

lunes, 11 de julio de 2016

A FEW MINUTES IN THE GARDEN

We’ve got a small wildflower garden in the corner of our front yard where the rain gauges are. It looked odd to have the gauges in the front yard in the first place, but that’s where the weather service put the big one, so that’s where they all went. I planted a few Gregg’s Blue Mistflower around them the first year, and that looked pretty good. It calmed the corner a bit and made the rain gauges look like they belonged there and not something left on the street to be picked up.
The next year fall asters moved in on their own, so I enlarged the flower bed a bit more and added skullcap and ox-eye daisies to the edges. This year it grew again when we put in Lemon Bee balm, Chamomile and Indian Blanket, and now it’s 8 x8 feet square. It looks really nice there in the corner, and several people have commented how pretty the bee balm looks. I’ll have to trim the asters back a bit when they get too high (can’t block the rain gauges!)

That little corner garden has evolved into a native bee magnet. It’s amazing the variety of bees that show up there. This sunny morning in July I spent just over ten minutes taking photos of the bees there and ended up with
American Bumble Bee Bombus pensylvanicus
Eastern Carpenter Bee Xylocopa virginica
Halictidae (maybe genus Augochlora )
Metallic Green Bees genus Agapostemon

Southern Bronze Banded Bee
Halictus Ligatus
Leafcutter bee Megachile parallela
a tiny Leafcutter bee genus Megachile
Leafcutter bee genus Megachile
Resin Bee genus Heriades
Long-horned Bee Svastra obliqua
Plus a tiny Tiphiid wasp Tiphia vernalis, was in the grass next to the garden.
No Honey Bees in the garden that morning, they were all busy in the crape myrtle (and they aren’t native, anyway).

Publicado el lunes, 11 de julio de 2016 a las 04:59 PM por cgritz cgritz | 5 comentarios | Deja un comentario

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