Nov 2 2024 - The Rewards of Winter - Bugs gone

 

All of a sudden it is colder.  A lot colder.  I was thinking about the positives of having a deep freeze in the winter.  Bugs die.   Florida residents worry that a warm winter will mean a lot of insects the rest of the year. If we lived year-round in warmer climates we would have to attend to our bugs.  Not like here - we can swat and squash them away. They are small and bothersome, but not particularly worrisome?  Well we do have a big insect here.  It is the Praying Mantis.  It is up to 18 cm or 7 inches long - that was in 1929 in China.  Somehow we consider them gentle insects.   Praying Mantis are not in the same category as Beetles with those huge pincers.  They can be up to 17 cm and 6.7 inches long,and  they look fierce - there's the Hercules and the Macrodontia cervicornis, Titan, Giant longhorn, Actaeon, Atlas and the Elephant.  They are the size of a large hand.   I wouldn't step on one of those, would you?  Likely to reach out and grab my foot.  There's more. What about the insects like cockroaches?  And there are enormous flies, hornets, wasps, and of course spiders.   The fear of insects and spiders is common among humans.  A general wariness around bugs is normal.  Maybe that explains a good deal of our wariness behaviour.There are 10 quintillion insects on earth. And Scientists say we have both a fear and a disgust for insects.   So I ponder our weather growing colder, as I conclude this article on the "Biggest" insects.  At the bottom (of course) are more headlines and pictures.  There is a scary story of a different sort: "Donald Trump's Makeup Free Face..."  There are 2 pictures  one without makeup and then one with a shiny orange face with hair dyed match.  The article says the pictures have been fact-checked and confirmed authentic.  Which seems more unreal?  Insects 7 inches long or a former US President with orange makeup and hair?  I realized that I have an innate fear and disgust of an orange President.

This picture came from Cuba at the Che Guevara memorial.  The stone walls were embedded with shell and coral fossils.  They made beautiful patterns and abstract images.

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July 3 2022 - Summer Bugs

 

I assume that Millie ate something disagreeable for her at the July 1st party as she hasn't felt well the last two nights.  She had to go outside in the middle of the night, and I stood on the porch watching her.  An amazing firefly was out - it was making streaks in the night - like a tiny shooting star.  I'd never seen streaking fireflies before.  It got me considering how our summer is so active.  It is bug time.  There are great bugs, ok bugs, irritating bugs and terrible ones - that would be ticks.  And that's just a human view.  Plants must have a more extreme reaction to the bugs that take care of them vs the bugs that eat them.   I was watching the fly on the kitchen counter and there's all that foot rubbing that they do.  House flies taste with their feet, which are millions of times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. House flies also generally stay within one mile of where they were born.  Darn! They keep coming back into the house. But house flies are small things,  just irritants.  I was thinking about all the bugs that are in cottage country.  That brought up  dock spiders.  There is a video of a gigantic dock spider being hand fed.  The spider's name is Larry.   It isn't "hand feeding" actually, but a stick is used to feed it a grasshopper, and then a fly on a stick, and then another.  And so on.  Larry likes to eat and it is bigger than the signal reflectors on the dock.  Here it is in its own video.   One becomes aware of how many bugs there are in cottage country.   There seem to be more of more varieties - horse flies (the biggest), deer flies, moose flies, mosquitoes everywhere.  Itchy!  That's one of the cottage country experiences.   So it seems to me that we are lucky in Niagara to have some insects and not a lot.  I'll take the Monarch butterfly in the front garden yesterday.  It was flying around the Milkweed plants.   If we had a true Carolinian climate here, there would be many more bugs and mosquitoes.  I read that the early settlers did a lot of clearing of the land to get rid of all the bugs.  It worked. Daylily season has started.

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Beenormous

The biggest bee in the world has recently been seen.  The last sighting in the field was 1981.  While there have been numerous attempts to rediscover it, there were no results.  It is known as Wallace's giant bee, Megachile pluto. It has jaws like a stag-beetle.  Here is the picture to show how big it is.  This bee lives in Moluccas, an archipelago within the Banda Sea, Indonesia.  Here is the comparison shown in the article that's on the weather network site.   There are more big bugs - really big bugs.  For example, the largest beetle is Titanus giganteum.  It is 6.6 inches long, so is the size of a human hand.  It can easily snap a pencil in half.  The longest insects on the planet are stick insects.  They can grow as long as 2 feet in Southeast Asia where the longest variety lives.  I consider it lucky that we did not see a Giant weta in New Zealand.  They can weigh more than a sparrow and are among the heaviest insects in the world.  They are about 4 inches long. Their name means "God of the Ugly Things'.  While they are really ugly, another big insect is the beautifully marked black and white Goliath beetle.  They can grow to over 4 inches.   A wing span of 1 foot and a total wing area of 60 square inches is what an Atlas moth's size is.  They have cocoons that are occasionally used as purses in Taiwan.  Grown for their fagara silk, all that has to be done is install a zipper. In comparison to this month, the largest butterfly is Queen Alexandra's birdwing - it has a wingspan of more than 1 foot, and is found in Papua New Guinea.  If you want to see pictures of all of these the MNN (Mother Nature Network) site has them HERE.  One that isn't covered in the article is the longest earthworm.  It is native to the southeaster state of Victoria in Australia, and is 3.3 feet long and 2 inches in diameter.  They can live 5 years, so have been known to grow to 9.8 feet long.  And what about when they stretch?  The 3 foot worm can stretch up to 12 feet. Our picture today is a pretty swallowtail butterfly in the garden.