August 17, 2018
Summer hit hard last weekend in Duluth, with temperatures climbing to the upper 80s or low 90s. To beat the heat, I mounted box fans in my windows and ran them over night when it was cooler. Because I live in an apartment, I set the fans to pull cool outside air in rather than […]
August 3, 2018
This week, I got two calls inquiring about wasps. The similarities in the calls were remarkable; in both cases, heavy wasp activity was noted in playgrounds with sand ground covers. The wasps had a very direct flight path, with only a couple seconds’ pause between landing and crawling down a tunnel or leaving a tunnel […]
July 27, 2018
National Moth Week is upon us; a time to appreciate those mostly night-flying puff-balls of scales that can tell us about the plant community and ecosystem of a broad area, all at one bright porch light. Moths belong to the order Lepidoptera (which translates as scale-wing), and are the adult form of caterpillars. With around […]
June 22, 2018
Pollinator week was created to raise awareness of what pollinators are , why we need them, what challenges they face, and what we can do to help. To that aim, we have run a series of posts that introduces pollinators and their importance, describes why pollinators pollinate, explores how both plants and pollinators cooperate or […]
June 21, 2018
Throughout our Pollinator Week blog series, we’ve covered what pollinators are, why they pollinate, and how both plants and pollinators work the system. Now, let’s highlight some of the major pollinators in our area – what makes them unique, and what can we do conserve them? Honey bees (Apis mellifera) Honey bees have been the […]
June 21, 2018
As I mentioned in our last post highlighting pollinators, both the plant and the pollinator do what they do because it benefits them, not out of altruism for the other. Sometimes the arrangement works out to be mutually beneficial, but sometimes the arrangement is more nefarious. There are also some really cool examples of checks […]
