July - 2022

A lovely video about Maria Sibylla Merian

One of the most significant contributors to entomology.

Saving birds' lives

Illustrator: Cathryn Virginia A great solution to helping save birds from crashing into buildings: bird-safe glass. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-01-04/how-to-design-buildings-to-prevent-bird-crashes?fbclid=IwAR0XaYoBTNbgmyeuN-CP48PKfzyHmmNc5Qt0slXEipX5fpi0MwixIVx67bk

Mama Monarch encounters Monarch caterpillar

Mama monarch was making the rounds of milkweed plants, laying eggs. Then she encountered a very large monarch caterpillar, minding its business, devouring leaves on a Narrow-leaf milkweed plant. Perhaps it is one of her children? The caterpillar looks like it could be in 4th or 5th instar. It was not amused. I suspect the caterpillar was upset because mama was holding onto it with all four legs. Soon after I took these photos mama flew on to other milkweed plants while the ca

It's official. The monarch butterfly is endangered

Monarch butterflies cluster at the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary to begin their wintering in Pacific Grove, Calif., in 2021. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) A great article in The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/21/monarch-butterfly-endangered-iucn/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F376fb98%2F62d979e9cfe8a21601fc0404%2F5986e383ad

Just sayin'

Read more here https://homegrownnationalpark.org/tallamys-hub-1?fbclid=IwAR1kYonrC1AZ4uejyrH1wr3Zw-yjxCNTiw26QWgEunuQTCNwMLS4JBOblbg

We need more bugs. Lots of bugs.

Check out your native plant society: http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/native-plant-societies-in-north-america.html?fbclid=IwAR1KjBOB-WPFfijlgXuQr_RUA9fJFBS09u5X2BA341YwV3kVwRrMAghjClw

Sleeping Bee

This morning there were a lot of damp surfaces in the garden and on porch railings, remainders of our wonderful Bay Area fog. I decided to check for any sleeping bees. Here is one, a Long-Horned bee sleeping on one of the California Delta sunflowers. Next to it a caterpillar is also sleeping. As I observed the bee, it woke up and started to crawl up to the petals of the sunflower. You can see why the bee is a Summer Long-horned bee. Those antennae! And I love the tiny hooks o

Big Bee Bonanza

Want to help? Community science-driven Big Bee Bonanza could use your help digitizing data from nearly 180,000 individual bee specimens from our Entomology collections so it's available to researchers all over the world. Any human with access to a computer can help. So far there are only 264 of us volunteers helping classify the size of bees. You don't need to go anywhere, but you must be precise. Here's the link: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/md68135/notes-from-nature-

Bolinas rancher helps to bring back Monarch butterflies

https://youtu.be/KqMsgACFnlk A rancher in Bolinas, California is creating a butterfly habitat to help the Monarch population as well as other pollinators.