16 March 2023

While Pittsburgh experienced a “Too Early Spring” for plants, 7 Feb to 7 March, it was also a weird time for honeybees. Thirteen days of temperatures above 54ºF(*) with blooming trees and flowers prompted honeybees to begin foraging. I often found them at the cherry blossoms but couldn’t catch one in a photograph.

This week the average temperature stayed near freezing for four days in a row so I was surprised to see a few bees emerging from the hive pictured at top when it was only 45ºF. In fact I was surprised to see the hive at all on the roof of The Porch restaurant at Schenley Plaza. It’s probably warmer up there.

Crazy spring weather, hot then sudden cold, can sap honeybee strength and make them susceptible to disease. To make matters worse freezing weather kills the flowers (food supply) so beekeepers provide supplemental feeding to help their bees over the rough spots.

Now there’s happy news about a bee vaccine, provided through supplemental feeding, that can innoculate honeybees from one of the worst diseases: American foulbrood (AFB).

Foulbrood is caused by a spore-forming bacteria, Paenibacillus larvae, that kills honeybee larvae without harming the adults. As the larvae die off, AFB weakens the colony and can quickly lead to its death in only three weeks. The bacteria is so hard to eradicate that infected hives must be burned.

Developed by biotech company Dalan Animal Health,

The vaccine, which contains a dead cell of the virus, is administered to the bees through the queen feed that worker bees consume. The worker bees then transfer the vaccine into the royal jelly and feed it to the queen. As a result, the vaccine gets deposited into her ovaries, giving larvae immunity when they hatch.

— CBS News: USDA approves vaccine for honeybees

Read more about the foulbrood vaccine here at CBS News and the press release on Business Wire.

(photos by Kate St. John)

p.s.(*) I say 54ºF because, according to the University of Maine Extension, “The minimum temperature for honeybee flight is 54º F.  The optimum temperature for flight activity is 72-77º F.”

Last week the Washington Post reported that the number of ants on earth is unimaginably large. Scientists from the University of Hong Kong estimated there are 20 quadrillion total or 2.5 million ants for each human being.

They reached this number by combining studies from thousands of researchers around world whose reports span a century. Dedicated ant researchers count ants by literally trapping them or by sweeping them up in leaf litter and counting what they’ve found. Their counts were combined and extrapolated to reach the 20 quadrillion estimate.

Why count ants? To get a benchmark on their population. Our planet is in the midst of an insect apocalypse in which the number of insects has declined 75% over the past 50 years. Butterflies and beetles are the hardest hit. Has the trend affected ants? Soon we’ll know.

Some of you are probably thinking: Wouldn’t we be better off without bugs? Actually, no. The insect apocalypse matters because bugs provide so many hidden benefits. They consume decayed matter, plant seeds, aerate the soil, pollinate plants and ultimately feed the larger organisms on earth. Their disappearance is especially dire for anything that directly eats insects and anything that eats the insect-eaters. Especially birds.

The decline of insects is one reason why birds have declined 29% in North America in the past 50 years. Hardest hit have been the insect eaters — swallows, swifts and nighthawks. In fact most songbirds feed insects (protein) to their young even if they eat fruits and seeds at other times of year.

Here are just a few of the birds that eat insects at least part of the time. Some of them may surprise you.

Learn more about ants at “The Washington Post: Scientists have calculated how many ants are on Earth. The number is so big it’s ‘unimaginable.’“

Read about the insect apocalypse in The Guardian: The insect apocalypse “Our world will grind to a halt without them”.

p.s. Did you know that northern flickers eat ants?

(photos from Wikimedia Commons including insect-eating American redstart, mountain bluebird, barn swallows, olive-sided flycatcher, American kestrel at these links)

16 September 2022

This Asian butterfly is a camouflage artist. When its wings are open it’s orange and brown and iridescent blue, below.

But when its wings are closed it looks like a leaf, shown at top.

Touch the “leaf” and it comes alive as an orange oakleaf butterfly (Kallima inachus).

Kallima inachus, the orange oakleaf, is a butterfly found in Tropical Asia. With wings closed, it closely resembles a dry leaf with dark veins and is a spectacular and commonly cited example of camouflage https://t.co/Gni6zCMGpn [source of the gif: https://t.co/RSSUeIGwJx] pic.twitter.com/fiooNzm2hZ

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 21, 2022

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)

12 September 2022

Mainland spiders are found on remote islands 400 miles from the nearest land and have been noted by ships 1,000 miles at sea. How did they get there?

When baby spiders (spiderlings) disperse and when lightweight species really want to go places they wait for a light wind and electrically charged air. When conditions are right they stand on a high exposed spot on extended legs, tip up their back ends, and eject several gossamer threads from their spinnerets.

The silk automatically forms a lightweight triangular shaped parachute and, because its electrical charge matches the ground and is opposite to the air, it’s repelled from below and pulled into the sky. The gossamer parachute rises up and away and drags the spider with it. And he’s off! Flying backwards thanks to static electricity.

This action, called ballooning, can carry an individual spider at least 1,000 miles on a light wind and two to three miles above the earth (10,500-16,000 feet). The spider can stay airborne over open ocean and thus colonize an island.

Not all spiders go ballooning but the species that do, like the trashline orbweaver (Cyclosa turbinata) pictured at top, have quite a wide distribution.

How can you tell that tiny spiders have been flying? When you see lots of spider silk clinging to branches in a light breeze you’ve found the aftermath of a mass ballooning event.

Read more about spider ballooning at Ask Nature: Spiders Fly Riding Electric Current and at Spiders Colonized A Remote Pacific Island By Flying There.

See the original University of Bristol study, July 2018, at Science Direct: “Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders”.

(photo credits are in the captions, click on the captions to see the originals)

4 September 2022

Dung beetles coexist with large animals because their entire life cycle depends on the droppings of cattle, elephants and other mammals. When Scarabaeus beetles find a dung pile each one makes a ball and uses its hind legs to roll the ball away from competitors, then buries it in a private location for later consumption. Here a sacred scarab beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) rolls and digs.

To move a dung ball the Scarabaeus beetle travels backwards in a straight line against all obstacles. When the ball rolls off course, the beetle climbs to the top, reorients itself and resumes pushing in the correct direction. This so impressed the Ancient Egyptians that they venerated the sacred dung beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) and carved amulets in its image(*).

How do these beetles navigate?

A 2015 study of South African Scarabaeus lamarcki found that the beetles use the sun’s direction and the variation in the sky’s green and ultraviolet colors like a compass. For example, this S. lamarcki beetle travels in the exact opposite direction when researchers use a mirror to show the bug reflected sunlight.

And a 2019 study found that they also pay attention to the wind when the sun is too high to help. See “(Not only) the wind shows the way.”

Traveling upside down and backwards requires lots of navigational tools.

(*)p.s. Did you know that the sacred dung beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, is the origin of scarab jewelry?

The scarab (kheper) beetle was one of the most popular amulets in ancient Egypt because the insect was a symbol of the sun god Re. … The scarab forms food balls out of fresh dung using its back legs to push the oversized spheres along the ground toward its burrow. The Egyptians equated this process with the sun’s daily cycle across the sky, believing that a giant scarab moved the sun from the eastern horizon to the west each day, making the amulet a potent symbol of rebirth.

— MeTropolitan Museum of Art: Egyptian Art, Scarabs

Millennia later, a scarab jewelry pin from the late 1960’s.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons and Kate St. John; click on the captions to see the originals)

2 September 2022

When we say that a bird has “moth-like flight” do we mean that its wings move like this? Check out Dr. Adrian Smith’s fifteen moths in slow motion flight.

1 wing flap from 15 moth species pic.twitter.com/GE9udTmTUv

— Adrian Smith (@DrAdrianSmith) August 25, 2022

p.s. Polyphemus moth species is shown above. Can you find it in the video?

(photo from Wikimedia Commons, tweet embedded from @DrAdrianSmith)