Adventures in raising littles to become budding naturalists in their own back yard and beyond. The wonders of the natural world await if we could only take the time… Follow me on Twitter @naturemomtexas!
Pollinators, insects and their magical relationships with one another, the plants, animals, and namely birds they touch are an ongoing delight in our family’s day to day lives. My kids are and I are always on the lookout for the next species of something that we haven’t seen yet in our own backyard.
We just spotted a new lizard (potential Texas spiny), aside from our regular green anoles the other day. The chickadee pair is back. A downy woodpecker has been stopping in at our feeder and digging into a dying crepe myrtle in the neighbor’s yard.
Still on the lookout for new bees (other than our common western honeybee), but we need more flowers. (And neighbors who don’t spray their yards.)
On that note, the kids and I are also doubly aware of the effect insecticides have on this biodiversity.
This article from National Geographic outlining the news concerning songbird consumption of seeds laced with neonicotinoid insectides and resultant appetite loss is deeply concerning.
The world's most widely used insecticide has been linked to the dramatic decline in songbirds in North America https://t.co/sCrHaknfZ4
If the European Union has banned neonicotinoid use, what is stopping our country from doing the same? Well there are certainly plenty of ways to answer that question.
But we as a society should be in an uproar that we are returning to a state where poison runs so deeply in our food and water systems that songbirds are withering from our suburbs, creating a disturbing silence that drove Rachel Carson to publish her book, “Silent Spring” in September of 1962.
Her works helped launch changes in our government with regulations that curbed poisons that were not only killing off widespread populations of birds within our communities, but were affecting the development of children both in the womb and on the street. She changed all of our lives for the better. Fast forward almost 60 years later.
Seeds laced with neonicotinoids? Surely there are other ways to solve the problem of famine. Fragmenting and ultimately destroying our food web only undermines any future we have of solving anything.
Over the summer, our mint went wild and so did its blooms which gave the kids and I a chance to really check out some bees. I purposely did not trim them down because we just enjoyed our pollinators too much.
In the meanwhile, we learned a few things!
A flat-tailed leafcutter bee on our mint.
For instance, how to ID a leafcutter bee.
These guys have mandiblesand an ability to sip nectar. AND unlike other bees, they carry the pollen on their bellies. How cool is that! I mentioned these facts to my 6 year old and she apparently already knew all about the belly fuzz – way before I came along with my big mouth. Hooray!
The female leafcutter bee carries pollen on the underside of her hairy abdomen, and then scrapes the pollen off within her individual nesting hole. Pollen is carried loose and dry on her hair and it falls off easily as she moves among blossoms. Alfalfa leafcutter bees do not mind being hit on the head as the alfalfa flower’s keel is tripped open and this characteristic is what made them the darling of alfalfa fields. Although they are named after alfalfa, these bees are generalists that will visit many different kinds of flowers. Leafcutter bees have a short flying range of only 300 feet from their bee house and you can be sure they are busy at work nearby in your garden or field. Leafcutter bees are active in the warm summer months and they are perfect for pollinating squash, melons, cucumbers, peas and other summer vegetables and fruits.
They are solitary bees, so they require those mandibles to cut away tiny circular pieces of leaves and flower petals to line their little tubes of a nest for their babies (do not worry – they do no harm to the plants). The mothers mainly rear a single baby all on their own, mostly in a tunnel dug into dry soil. They are not aggressive at all, and I can speak firsthand as my children played around them all day.
Alas these bees only visited our mint for about a week before they disappeared and the western honeybees appeared in their numbers. Another mystery of nature! (Or should I sadly say attack of a neighbor’s pesticides?) Yet another reason not to spray the ground, or your yard in general – you might be destroying a single mom’s home.
Buzzaboutbees.net offers a great discussion on the leafcutter bee with videos of it in action, it’s nests, detailed photos, Q&A’s, and more!
Leafcutter bees are increasingly recognised for their farm crop pollination service. In fact, the US Agricultural Research Service state that 1 alfalfa leafcutter bee can do the job of 20 honey bees! Surprisingly, in research, they discovered that about 150 of these little bees working in greenhouses (or similar) can provide the pollination service of 3,000 honey bees (1).
I’m sure glad I didn’t crop our remaining coreopsis flower heads – they made beautiful hiding places for all the tiny insects hanging around.
The Texas Butterfly Ranch article features local researcher and author John L. Neff – check out his recent publication on solitary bees from Princeton University Press!
And if you want to support mason and other solitary bees alike, try out one of these houses – they should have depth, be located in the shade, hopefully within 300 feet of your garden, and have a rooftop awning far out enough to keep moisture from entering the tubes too easily.
And for kicks, here is a shot of a leafcutter bee I took outside the Natural History Museum of Utah (www.nhmu.utah.edu), enthusiastically pointing it out to the kids who were like, “Yeah, mom.” “Cool, mom.” I guess they’ve gotten their share of pollinator exposure this summer. But, bees!
The best teacher around our home has been our garden. It is a constant source of curiosity, beauty and wonder in the ways of the world and the gist of it revolves around a 4×4 foot bed. Some corners act as a sandbox, while others have served as roly poly playgrounds. It’s a tasting garden with regular sampling of all leaves within.
Our tiny bed of paradise began when, after hearing my laments concerning small garden space and constrictions set by the neighborhood HOA, a friend tipped us off on the idea of square foot gardening. We quickly built the first bed and accompanying side boxes in our one accessible sunny spot and started visiting the local farmers markets for plants (not necessarily on the lookout for natives – just anything fun for our very young tots to interact with).
Here’s a good book on how to introduce gardening to kids – from toddlers through teens. It even includes scientific experiment setups!
The bed began with locally grown chard and strawberries (still going strong after almost 6 seasons), a blackberry bush, herbs, and other random vegetables. Then by perfect chance, another friend in a mom’s social circle advertised she was sharing excess black swallowtail caterpillars to raise from her over-consumed parsley plants. We enthusiastically took some home in a mason jar and began our saga of the pollinator garden. Learn all about how to raise a black swallowtail caterpillar from this Texas Butterfly Ranch article! We await a visit from these beauties every spring on our potted fennel and plant carrot family varieties every chance we get. The kids really enjoy inspecting for tiny caterpillars feasting away and delight in finding their unusual chrysalises (varying green to brown) hidden among the tree branches or along the garden wall, all the while looking for any bugs they can find like tiny treasures in that box of ours.
Now we are on the hunt for native bees. We’ve established a bed of Gregg’s mistflower which has experienced it’s first transplanting to other corners of the yard. It brought in hoards of queen and monarch butterflies late last summer, which also brought the neighbor kids after seeing them flutter through our alleyway. And after a second year since planting from seed, we have a beautiful and very tall variety of lance leaf coreopsis.
Our 3 year old son calls the seedlings our “babies.” I purchased this TX wildflower seed mix from Sprouts but did not see these blooms until the second year. A little research told me this is typical wildflower behavior! In other words, patience brings gifts. “It is easily propagated from seed and as is typical of many native wildflowers, it is often not until the second year when numerous blooms are formed.” https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/coreopsis_lanceolata.shtml
And our most ambitious attempt! …to grow native milkweed which is pretty difficult to buy from garden centers and even plant sales due to the establishment of tap roots from initial growth. I’ll write more on that in a later post. But I have a feeling most posts will return to the garden where the soil, plants, and bugs (from roly polies to insects to spiders and more!) all have a great lesson to teach my littles and myself on so many levels.
So on the title photo – my kids and I found this fascinating insect relaxing this sunny spring afternoon. Fly or bee? I posted it to iNaturalist.org and we anxiously await the results.
NatureMomTexas 