September 10, 2018
It’s head louse awareness month, a perfect time to put our heads together so these little blood suckers can have a party! But seriously, these pests can work wonders for ruining the start of the school year as they spread from child to child and deliver itch-inducing bites. Being pests that cannot survive long off […]
August 23, 2018
If you’re on Facebook, you may have noticed a new viral post that was created the day before yesterday (Aug. 21) warning people of a new spider that allegedly killed five people in the past week. The spider pictured on the post is a woodlouse spider, Dysdera crocata. It is native to the Mediterranean region, […]
August 20, 2018
Last Saturday (August 18) was National Honey Bee Day, an awareness day put together by beekeepers in the U.S. to promote and raise awareness of beekeeping. Bees, and honey bees in particular, are important but commonly misunderstood, so I thought I would use this post to highlight some fun facts about bees in general and […]
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 […]
