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Seen on the Wing: Bees Observed During 2025 Farm Flower Surveys, Part 1.

by Conrad.

parasitic bee on sunflower

A Triepeolus bee about to get sucked into a Sunflower vortex (just kidding). These bees parasitize long-horned bees (see below).

INTRO

During the Summer, we collected data on the distribution and abundance of seeded and uncultivated flowers on and around nine different farms. We also gathered observations of bee visitation to those flowers. Future blog posts will explore this information in more mathematical detail in order to try to get a better understanding of the relative values of cultivated vs. uncultivated flowers in supporting bees. While the flower preferences of most of these bees are relatively well known, it is likely that such preferences are context dependent. In other words, like a person at a buffet, what is chosen depends on what else is available, so if our observations are useful, it is because they are derived from the actual context of regional farms and the flowers that are grown thereon, intentionally or incidentally.

A more skilled biologist than me could have conducted detailed visual surveys that gathered both behavioral data (that is, which flowers were visited?) and biodiversity data (that is, which bee species showed up?) However, I could not do both. Instead, I identified the relatively easy groups, such as Honey Bee, Bumble Bee and a couple of others, during the surveys. I took photos of the ‘unknowns’ when I could and then went back and tried to ID those bees from images. Most bees I saw were never photographed, and thus the collection of profiles that follow is in no way a complete list. In fact in Columbia County alone we have, summarizing across various years of work done by our program, found more than 150 species of bees; I registered less than 25 species during our observations this Summer.  While some of this discrepancy may reflect the limited number of habitats and dates included in this project, it also reflects the shortcomings of my technique as a biodiversity study tool. Most biodiversity assessment studies use trapping of some form. Using photographs and visual tallies, I often can’t determine the species and below I’ll often talk at the broader scale of genera (genera are higher levels of biological organization than species; for example, wolves, coyotes and domestic dogs, while different species, are all members of the genus Canis).

diverse seeded flowers

A seeded mix of Zinnia, Cosmos and Sunflowers with some true wild flowers to boot, in bloom at Rose Hill Farm. A variety of flower shapes and sizes can support a diversity of bees (and other flower visitors).

SOME BASICS

It’s important to remember that bees visit flowers for both nectar and pollen, with nectar generally being an energy source and pollen providing protein. Bees may be less picky about the flowers from which they collect nectar than those from which they gather pollen, but, when making observations, I did not try to distinguish pollen gathering and nectar slurping. While nectar and pollen can serve as food for the adults, they are often used to stock the nest (e.g., honey). To facilitate such brood provisioning, most female bees have special pollen-gathering hairs on their legs and/or the underside of their abdomens. Pollen gathering may be intentional (in order to stock the nest or to eat themselves) or unintentional (picked up incidentally when nectar sipping). The flower’s game is to lure bees with sweet nectar and/or appealing pollen and then encourage their pollen to hitch a ride to another, receptive female flower. Obviously, for flowers whose pollen is being gathered for juvenile or adult consumption, the flower’s ‘hope’ is that the bee will be somewhat messy, shedding at least a few pollen grains during its travels. Males do not gather pollen for the nest, and do not have the special, pollen gathering hairs of females. Nonetheless, fuzzy male bees do attract and share some pollen from the flowers they visit. Another set of bees – the pollen robbers (aka nest parasites) – don’t collect pollen for their own young. Instead, the females of these species count on usurping the nest of another bee species who has already done the work of pollen gathering.

One can think about flower visitors in various ways: as units of biodiversity to be tallied up to meet conservation goals, as winged workers pollinating diverse crops, as aesthetic elements adorning flowers, as nuisances ready to deliver a sharp sting to the unwary… During our project, we certainly tried to tackle the first two perspectives, albeit only partially: which flowers seem to support our native bees and thus benefit both insect conservation and crop (and other plant) pollination? Our tentative answers to this question will be forthcoming in our data analysis blog posting, but in this post I simply want to think of bees as other elements of life. How do they ‘solve’ that wondrous mystery of making a living and perpetuating their kind, largely regardless of what value we attach to them as currency of conservation or pollination? I’ll throw in a little bit of management and conservation speculation, but these profiles are primarily natural history snippets derived in good part from many of the publications and web sites listed at the end of the blog and contextualized by our own observations.

caterpillar in squash flower

Squash Bee (top) and Not a Squash Bee (bottom, both at Blue Star Farm).

A FEW GENERALITIES FOR DESCRIBING BEES….

Bees have been categorized in different ways. One dimension is sociality. Most people’s first avatar of a bee is that of the Honey Bee. Relative to most of our other bees, the Honey Bee is, however, unusual. Specifically, its social system appears to be more complex and long-lasting than that of any of our other bees. The colony has distinct castes, can overwinter (and so must store up ample honey for the lean midwinter), and has complex communication amongst colony members, thereby focusing foraging and increasing its efficiency.  Colonial life facilitates an effective nest defense and the protection of a large brood and food stores demands it, hence the origins of angry, stinging swarms to fend off possible nest destruction. Bumble bees and several other species also show some level of social organization, and as the profiles that follow may suggest, sociality happens in a variety of ways and to a range of degrees. Many bees do occupy the opposite social pole and nest solitarily – e.g., as single, isolate holes or cavities that only the mother bee provides for. Yet others fall somewhere in between in their sociality.

Another ‘dimension’ used to describe bee ecology is nest location. Some bees place their nests in holes in the ground, others use hollow plant stems, still others nest in rotting wood, and various others use natural or man-made cavities, or, even, clumps of grass. While not all species are 100% consistent in their choice of nesting substrate, generalizations are possible. As already mentioned, some bees don’t even make their own nests, instead parasitize the nests of other species.

Yet another descriptor commonly applied to bees is tongue length. This may seem a bit arcane and, aside from ant eaters and frogs, this trait might be relatively rarely considered elsewhere in the animal world. Its significance for bees is that it helps determine which bees can access the nectar of which flowers. A flower that buries its nectar deep down its ‘throat’ may only be usable by bees with long tongues. To an appreciable degree, certain flowers are evolutionarily designed for certain bees and deploy their nectar in ways that will encourage the passing bee to brush against pollen-bearing anthers and pollen-receiving stigmas. The depth of the flower is one aspect of flower architecture used to encourage this bee/pollen encounter. Although tongue length can vary dramatically amongst bees of the same size, it is also true that smaller bees tend to have shorter tongues. Admittedly, this is an overgeneralization – a small enough bee may be able to crawl down the flower tube to access deep nectar, while other bees short-circuit the system by slitting into the flower tube and so gaining more direct access to the nectar. While I report both tongue lengths and flower depths based on the literature, it should be noted that bee foraging is more complicated than an oil dip stick and measurements of the relevant lengths can be somewhat inconsistent, so don’t expect tongue length and flower depth to fully explain bee foraging, but it is a clue.

A Long-Horn (Melissodes) Bee displays its ample tongue while on a flower at Whistledown Farm.

SOME BEE PROFILES

I was going to gather all my profiles for one ‘glorious’ posting. However, creating these profiles has proved more time consuming than expected, my schedule has gotten more crowded than anticipated, and it dawned on me that sometimes a couple of shorter reads is more digestible than one long haul, so… I’m starting out with profiles of five relatively common bee groups: Halictus (a genus of sweat bee), Agapostemon virescens (a beautiful, easy-to-ID-on-the-wing species of sweat bee), Ceratina (a genus of little carpenter bees), Hylaeus (a genus of tiny, wasp-like bees) and Mellisodes/Eucera (a couple of closely related so-called ‘long-horn’ bees). Missing from this installment are Honey Bees, bumble bees, Lasioglossum sweat bees (i.e., those tiny critters who barely look like bees) plus a few rarer groups – meat for a second installment.

A Halictus bee pauses on a Daisy Fleabane at the Hudson Valley Seed Company.

Halictus – An Underappreciated Work Horse.

The most common species in this genus is Halictus ligatus and most, if not all, of our Halictus records may be of this species. This species is a darkish bee about the size of a large house fly with a hairy thorax and an abdomen banded by light hairs. It has oddly thick jowls. Somebody once said that these are markedly non-descript bees and that that, in and of itself, is a useful ID characteristic!

Halictus are common, geographically widespread bees who fly Spring through Autumn, and are reported to feed on a wide variety of flowers (as would be predicted by their long flight season). It seems to have long been common – when first described by pioneering entomologist Thomas Say in the 1830s, Halictus ligatus was stated to be “A very abundant species.” As befits their reported commonness and broad tastes, Halictus were found on eight of the nine farms we studied this year. In 2010, when we collected bees on 19 different farms around Columbia County, this genus was found at 13 sites, and it accounts for slightly over 5% of the bees in our regional bee collection.

It is a colonial or solitary ground nester. Colonies of up to ca. 200 individuals usually have a single queen bee, Halictus “worker” bees are able to reproduce and can replace the queen if she dies or can even fly off and establish their own colony if the mood strikes them. In other words, their sociality is facultative, meaning that if conditions suggest, a given species can either develop a colony or nest solitarily. Unpredictable weather and short growing seasons tend to favor solitary habits. As in bumble bees, the colony as a whole does not overwinter but the next year’s colony is founded by an overwintering female. Nests are described as drilled holes in relatively compact ground (such as along trails and road edges) and maybe re-used for various years. Some have said that Halictus also nest in rotting wood.

Halictus bee on Chicory flower

A Halictus bee on Chicory at Hawthorne Valley Farm.

This is considered to be a short-tongued species with a tongue length (ca. 3 mm) about half that of the Honey Bee. Our Halictus observations were spread more or less evenly across 16 different flower species. Amongst the seeded flowers, we found it on Bachelor Buttons, Black-eyed Susan, Cosmos, Feverfew, Oxeye Daisy, Strawflower, Sunflower, and Yarrow. Wild-growing flowers included Corn Chamomille, Daisy Fleabane, Field Bindweed, Grass-leaved Goldenrod, other goldenrods, Horseweed, knapweeds, and Sweet White Clover. Relative to average corolla length across all other flowers (ca.7.7 mm), the flowers visited by Halictus were short (ca. 4.0 mm). This genus of bee is reported to be an important pollinator of peppers, tomatoes, strawberry, turnip, apple, and watermelon, plus various cut flowers like marigolds and zinnias.

Green Sweat Bee on Black-eyed Susan

Agapostemon virescens on Black-eyed Susan at Hawthorne Valley Farm.

Agapostemon virescens – The Satisfying Sweat Bee.

Agapostemon virescens is part of a family of bees called “Sweat Bees”, because of the propensity of some members of this family to seek the salts on sweaty skin; Agapostemon itself, however, is said not to share this taste. I call this species ‘satisfying’ because it is both conspicuous (the iridescent emerald green is hard to miss) and, with their striped abdomens, the females of this medium-sized bee are easy to identify.

This is another relatively widespread, long-flying, common species. We noted it at 6 of the 9 farms this year and at 9 of our 19 farms in 2010. This genus is the third most common in our collection, accounting for a bit more than 15% of all specimens.

Agapostemon virescens nests in the ground, apparently often where the surface is relatively open. These bees reportedly can (but don’t have to) nest in groups, but when they do so, each female makes and supplies her own brood. Think apartment building with only one or a few entrances but many individual families inside rather than the more complex sociality of Halictus, Honey Bees or Bumble Bees. For this reason, Agapostemon are sometimes  described as gregarious, rather than communal. Nonetheless, when found together, it is said that bees will take turns watching for predators and parasitoids, and will collaborate in aspects of nest repair. There are reportedly two generations during the season, with the first being all-female. It is bred females of the second generation who apparently overwinter.

Green Sweat Bee on thistle

An Agapostemon visits Canada Thistle at Whistledown Farm. Its ‘saddlebags’ are full of what is probably thistle pollen. If you get a chance, study the color of pollen carried by bees on different flowers – the variation amongst types of flowers can be surprising. For example, who knew Asparagus has day-glow orange pollen?

Agapostemon virescens bees are reported to forage at a wide variety of flowers, and we observed them on nine different species. Amongst seeded flowers, we saw them at Bachelor Buttons, Black-eyed Susan, Echinacea, and Sunflower; among wild flowers, they were seen on Elderberry, English Plantain, Knapweed, thistle, and White Clover. These are a mix of shallower and deeper flowers (average depth of visited flowers = 5.7 mm vs 7.4 mm for remaining flowers). Nonetheless, with a tongue length of about 3.7 mm, this is considered a short-tongued bee. Interestingly, the Sharp-Eastman photographic study of bees at Stone Barn Farm in Putnam County, noted that this was one of the few bees seen pollinating White Water Lily; during our farm work, we did not have a chance to test this observation! In terms of crop pollination, they are said to be especially common on carrots and cut flowers being grown for seed, but, as noted, they pollinate a wide variety of plants.

little green sweat bee mating

Ceratina feeding and mating on Feverfew at Stars of the Meadow Farm.

Ceratina – The Little, Motherly Carpenter Bee.

Ceratina are small bees with a blueish-green iridescence; they’re smaller than a small housefly but bigger than a gnat; perhaps think of them as a chubby long-grain rice kernels. While it’s hard to believe, their closest relative amongst our bees is apparently one of our largest bees – the Eastern Carpenter Bee, those massive, bumble bee-like creatures who drill into your outdoor woodwork. While Ceratina is somewhat inconspicuous, the teardrop shape of its tail end and the blue-green color mean that, with a little practice and good eyes, you can often ID it on the wing. The female (as well as the male) has a light patch on the ‘upper lip’. Ceratina also have relatively few pollen-collecting hairs on their legs or belly; some have suggested that they consume pollen on the flower and then regurgitate it in the nest, as Hylaeus (see below) is known to do.

We found this bee on seven of the nine farms we studied this year, and, in 2010, eight of the 19 farms visited. This genus accounts for 3% of the bees in our collection.

Ceratina bees apparently use their carpentorial skills to bore down the pith of stems such as those of raspberries, blackberries, roses and Queen Anne’s Lace (although stems have to be broken, so that there’s direct access to the pith). Despite often being considered solitary, they actually are reported to show some aspects of sociality – mothers tend young and sisters/daughters will help siblings and their mother. Rather than simply leave their eggs with provisions and ‘wish them luck’, mother Ceratina apparently not only guard the nest as the young develop but also help guard what then becomes the over-wintering hole (aka hibernaculum) of the emerged adult. Such a life history strategy, which depends on (or at least seems partially predicated on) an individual living for more than one year, is an unusual occurrence amongst bees.

little green carpent bee on Fleabane

Ceratina feeding on Daisy Fleabane at Little Seed Farm.

These are relatively common, widespread bees, who, like the preceding species, visit a variety of different flowers, indeed, we found this species to be widely distributed across 24 different kinds of flowers. Seeded plants included: Bachelor Buttons, Bird/Hairy Vetch, Black-eyed Susan, Butterfly Milkweed, Feverfew, marigold, Narrow-leaf Mountain Mint, Ox-eye Sunflower, Purple Coneflower, Snapdragon, Spotted Monarda, Garden Strawflower, White Coneflower, and White Gooseneck. Wild flowers visited by this species included Blackberry, Canada Thistle, Common St. Johnswort, Daisy Fleabane, Dandelion, Elderberry, English Plantain, knapweed, Sulphur Cinquefoil, and Viper’s Bugloss. They also visit roses and elderberry, both of which can be planted or wild. They are reported to be common pollinators of fruits, including apples, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, and melons.

With a tongue length of about 3.7mm, Ceratina are considered ‘long-tongued’ bees (although on the short end of long!). The flowers they visited had the deepest average corollas of any of the bees so far considered: 7.5 mm vs. 7.2 mm for the depth of the remaining flowers. It seems ironic that the smallest bees so far considered should visit the deepest flowers, but, as mentioned, something else is also at play here – these bees are so small, that they sometimes crawl down into the ‘throats’ of large, deep-tubed flowers, i.e., they walk their tongues to the nectar.

Because they nest in old pithy stems, leaving standing stalks of goldenrod, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, sumachs, and Queen Anne’s Lace can provide habitat. Cutting or breaking some of these at least a foot or so from the ground at the end of the first growing season will then ‘open the door’ and, assuming they are left undisturbed during the following growing season, these stalks could become valuable Ceratina nesting resources.

A Hylaeus bee on Common St. John’s-wort at Whistledown Farm.

Hylaeus – The Bee in Wasp’s Clothing.

Hylaeus are small, dark wasp-like bees. Their similarity to wasps is accentuated by their yellow-on-black markings, their elongated bodies, and their general lack of body fuzz. The yellow dashes along the inner side of the eyes on the female’s face look particularly waspish. These are part of a family of bees (Colletidae) who are popularly sometimes called “Cellophane bees”. This is not because they themselves are flimsy, but rather because they coat the inside of their nest capsules with a material somewhat like plastic wrap, which, as with sandwich wrap, seems to hold things together and deter fungus. This is all the more important given that the pollen-nectar mix that Hylaeus regurgitates to feed its young is a pretty soupy concoction (some authors talk about the larvae ‘swimming’ through it).

Hylaeus bee on White Lace flowers

Hylaeus on White Lace Flower at Treadlight Farm.

We found this species on eight of nine farms we studied this year. In 2010, the genus was found during sampling on five of 19 farms. In our collections, it accounted for less than 2% of all specimens. Some bees are more readily counted visually than captured using netting or bee bowls, and these numbers may reflect that.

These are solitary nesters with no indication of sociality. Some say that they nest in the pith of plant stems (like Ceratina), although other sources just say that they nest in pre-existing holes (given their delicate jaws). Their nests are parasitized by Gasteruption wasps, which we recorded on the farm where we saw the most Hylaeus.

A Gasteruption wasp. This genus is said to parasitize the nests of Hylaeus bees. We consider it a good sign when we see native parasitic bees or wasps, because it indicates that the host population is robust enough to support them.

Hylaeus is considered a generalist in terms of the flowers it visits. During our work it was, far and away, seen most commonly on wild Queen Anne’s Lace, however we also observed it on seeded Anise Hyssop, Dill, Orpine, and White Lace Flower. Amongst wild flowers, it was seen on Common St. Johnswort, Galinsoga, Grass-leaved Goldenrod, Hedge Bedstraw, Horseweed, knapweed, Lady’s Thumb, Sulphur Cinquefoil, Tall Goldenrod (and close relatives), and a yellow Brassica. It was also seen on roses, which might be wild or planted. Hylaeus is a small bee with a short tongue (<1mm), so it’s not surprising that the average tube length of these flowers was short (4 mm) relative to that of the remaining flowers (7.7 mm). It is one of the bees for whom the wild, weedier, less showy flowers may provide an important resource.

Hylaeus may not be important crop pollinators, given that their habit of carrying pollen internally limits the likelihood that they’ll share pollen amongst flowers.

Melissodes bee on Black-eyed Susan

A Melissodes bee on Black-eyed Susan at Whistledown Farm. See also the earlier image of the bee displaying its tongue and of the Squash Bee (the closely related Eucera).

Melissodes and Eucera – Chunky, Funky, Long-horned Loners.

These two bee genera are closely related and considered together. This group includes several species, including the Squash Bee, our primary pollinator of squash plants. These are medium-sized (perhaps a bit smaller than a Honey Bee), generally fuzzy bees. The males in particular have long antennae (the “horns” of the common name). One description of bees stated that the males looked “a little like furry Chinese dragons” (which only really makes sense if you recall the long whiskers on the face of many such beasts). Many species have an orangish-yellowish hue, although one of our relatively common species is black with a pair of white butt spots.

The genus was found on five of the nine farms we visited this year. In 2010, our sampling on 19 different farms encountered it on five different farms. These genera account for nearly 6% of the bees in our regional collection.

Melissodes bee on corn

A Two-spotted Melissodes (M. bimaculata) gathering pollen from Corn at Ironwood Farm.

Some Melissodes species can be especially common on Sunflowers late in the Summer. Indeed, some Sunflower beds we visited were almost swarming with these bees, sometimes with three or more to a flower.  The Squash Bee is, of course, most common on… squashes.

Melissodes are considered solitary ground nesters given that a single female provisions a single nest hole, often in sandier soils. They will, however, sometimes nest in clusters, perhaps because of the limited availability of appropriate soils, and, occasionally, multiple females have reportedly been observed sharing a single nest opening, suggesting not a true colony but at least a shared front door. Melissodes diligently shut up their nests with packed soil. Nonetheless, the nests of these bees are parasitized by Triepeolus bees, a relatively large, distinctly marked creature, who follow a mother Melissodes back to the nest from a flower where they were foraging. They then descend the nest hole and lay their own egg by the pollen stash and egg of Melissodes. The resulting larva of Triepeolus then devours both host larva and its cache.

Melissodes tend to be late-season flyers and do seem to specialize somewhat by flower type, with our most common regional Melissodes seeming to favor Sunflowers. Our own observations supported this preference for Sunflowers, but they were also seen on a range of other flowers including, amongst seeded flowers, Bachelor Button, Black-eyed Susan, Blanket Flower, Brown-eyed Susan, Celosia, Coreopsis, Corn (!), Digitalis, Echinacea, Marigolds, Spearmint, Statice, and Zinnia. Among wild flowers, these bees were found on Chicory, Cosmos, Joe-Pye Weed and knapweeds. As this list suggests, many of these bees seem particularly fond of flowers in the Aster family, squash bees being an obvious exception.

Triepeolus on Sunflowers at Little Seed Gardens. A good place to get a nip of nectar and wait until your favorite host (Melissodes) happens by.

Melissodes and close relatives can be important crop pollinators for more than just squash and Sunflowers; they are also reported from cotton, alfalfa, muskmelons, watermelon, canola, and coffee, although given the relatively late-season flight times, they are not found regionally on spring-flowering fruits like apples.

Melissodes are considered ‘long-tongued’ bees, with a tongue length of 4-6 mm. The average depth of the flowers they visited (7.9 mm) was slightly larger than that of the flowers where they weren’t seen (7.2 mm).

CLOSING COMMENTS.

While we will develop these ideas further in later installments, even this small set of profiles illustrates some important points:

  • The bee community includes more than Honey Bees and bumble bees. That’s probably a pretty obvious statement, but it can be easy to overlook the diversity of less conspicuous native bees out there ‘doing their thing’. Indeed, prior to the late 20th century few entomologists even considered the role of the wild bees in crop pollination!
  • These are a diverse bunch, not only in terms of appearance but also in terms of behaviors – Are they social? Where do they nest? Which flowers do they favor?
  • A diversity of bees needs a diversity of flowers to support them. Above we have noted the aster-favoring tendencies of some Melissodes, and the shallow inconspicuous flowers favored by Hylaeus. Likewise, at least in a farm situation, some bees are more or less reliant on seeded plants, while others prosper on the weeds.
  • Importance to crops is variable and, of course, the agronomic utility of the bees depends, in part, on the crops one is trying to grow. It should be acknowledged that part of our goal is simply to conserve wild bees for their own sakes.
  • Nesting location also varies and suggests various management techniques including sand piles and high-cut herbaceous stubble.

In the next installment of this blog, I plan to profile a few other bee groups. Claudia and I will then join forces for a data summary posting. We’re out of the field and at the desk…

USEFUL REFERENCES

iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org) – This web site was a big help in identifying my bee photos; not only does it make a trained guess at what a creature is, it helps one link into a community of bee aficionados and experts.

Bee Watching (https://watchingbees.com) – Created by a couple of young bee experts, this web site gives tips for on-the-wing bee identification.

Wild Bees of New York (https://www.sharpeatmanguides.com) – This beautifully illustrated bee guide was created for Stone Barn Farms in Putnam County, but it works pretty well for us too!

The Danforth Lab at Cornell (https://www.danforthlab.entomology.cornell.edu/) – This is one of the State’s leading bee labs. See also https://cals.cornell.edu/pollinator-network/ny-bee-diversity and the book The Solitary Bees (2019) by Bryan N. Danforth, Robert L. Minckley, and John L. Neff.

The Bees in your Backyard: A Guide to North American Bees (2015) by Joseph S. Wilson and Olivia Messinger Carril. A really nice and useful introduction to our wild bees.

Common Bees of Eastern North America by Olivia Messinger Carril and Joseph S. Wilson. Drier than the previous volume and a field guide rather than an overview, but a handy reference.

The Melissodes Project (https://themelissodesproject.wildref.org/) by Frank Hogland, who provided welcome help identifying our bees in this genus.

The paper “Covariation among reproductive traits in flowering plants shapes their interactions with pollinators” by Jose B. Lanuza and colleagues was the source for most of my flower depth measurements (https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.14340). This was supplemented by the work of Franziska Baden-Böhm and colleagues, “The FloRes Database: A floral resources trait database for pollinator habitat-assessment generated by a multistep workflow”, available at https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.14340 and by the work of Barry A. Prigge and Arthur C. Gibson, A Naturalist’s Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California, as accessible from https://www.smmflowers.org/mobile/ANF-other/ANF_Descriptions_TOC_Mobile.htm. (Looks like a great flora, almost makes me sorry not to live there!)

Bee tongue lengths were taken from the work of Daniel P. Cariveau and colleagues, “The Allometry of Bee Proboscis Length and Its Uses in Ecology”, available at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151482


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June with the Flowers & Bees.

A green sweat bee visits a Black-eyed Susan at Hawthorne Valley Farm.

by Claudia & Conrad.

Background

Deriving from our conversations within the Farmer-Ecologist Research Circle during the winter and early spring of 2025, this season we are exploring a set of questions related to on-farm flowers and beneficial insects. Specifically, wild flower plantings are being promoted for a variety of reasons, including their support of insects. At the same time, the value of fallow and edge wild flowers is sometimes underappreciated. The Circle thus became interested in understanding what resources planted flowers might provide to insects relative to what wild-growing flowers are providing – are such plantings worth the extra effort? How might the seeded and the unseeded flowers best complement each other?

Specifically, our questions are the following:

  • Which flowers (cultivated and wild-growing, native and non-native, intentionally managed or growing spontaneously) occur on farms? Where on the farm do they occur and when in the season?

  • Which of the above flowers are most attractive to easily observable insect groups (such as Bumble Bees, Other Native Bees, Honey Bees, and Hoverflies)? Does one size fit all flower-wise, or is a diversity of floral shapes, sizes and colors important?

  • Based on the answer to the above two questions, which areas of each of the participating farms might be providng the most flower resources to each insect groups and how does that differ across the growing season?

There are various ways that one might approach answering these questions. The ‘Cadillac’ version (did we just date ourselves?) might be to do intensive surveys of flower diversity and abundance based on sampling plots and multiple counts coupled with some sort of standardized insect surveys such as with bee-bowl traps and netting. While potentially more rigorous, this would be a full-time job, plus it might not actually give much information on the value of individual types of flowers. So, instead, we decided to do something that is a bit more “quick-and-dirty,” but which, we hope, nonetheless allows us to get a good first glimpse of the answers to the above questions.

A bumble bee on Broccoli at Little Seed Farm.

During our monthly visits (June through September), we try to spend 2-4 hours at each farm, documenting the flowers and their insect visitors in a section of the farm that includes a variety of habitats and management units. While doing the entirety of each farm would be cool, it’s beyond our current person-power. During each visit, Claudia ranks the abundance of the flowers of each species in each management unit and also assesses the overall flower abundance in each of those. She identifies each plant in flower and assigns it a floral abundance rank (A through D, with D being most common). Conrad observes and counts the insect visitors to flowers by doing five-minute ‘wandering flower watches’ for each species. For simplicity, four insect groups are presented here: Bumble Bees, Other Wild Bees, Honey Bees, and Hover Flies. During each of these strolls, new flowers of the given species are constantly being found and the observed presence of any insects is tallied. (The small print: To help correct for the effects of a particular farm or day, these flower visitation rates are standardized by the overall mean of the visitation rate for each of the four insect groups across all flowers on the given farm and then the standardized values for the focal flower are averaged across all farms at which that flower was observed.)

As the above map shows, the participating farms are Blue Star Farm, Hawthorne Valley Farm, Ironwood Farm, Little Seed Gardens, Whistledown Farm (all in Columbia County), Rose Hill Farm (in Dutchess County), Hudson Valley Seed Company, Stars of the Meadow Farm, and Treadlight Farm (all in Ulster County).

By jointly examining the results, we hope to help farmers see which areas of their farms might already be doing “good work” in support of certain flower-visiting insects, where there might be spatial or seasonal gaps in resources for these insect groups on a particular farm, and what might be practical ways to improve the floral offering. That said, it’s important to realize that there are factors other than just immediate flower availability which can affect bee (and other insect) abundance. These include access to suitable nesting conditions (such as good burrowing soils for ground nesters or the presence of hives for Honey Bees), conducive land use in the general surroundings (for example, freedom from pesticides or intensive car traffic), a flowering calendar that provides nectar and pollen throughout the insects’ life cycles, and, potentially, freedom from competition (under some conditions, Honey Bees are thought to compete with certain other bees species).

A Bronze Copper feeds at the flowers of Asian Greens at Blue Star Farm (we do tally butterflies, but haven’t see enough of them to warrant including them as a category).

This blog shares our observations from the first round of visits (June 5 to July 3, 2025) and illustrates our approach. The delineation of the habitats and management units is tentative and we expect to make some refinement in the next round of site visits.

Please let us know which results are most interesting to you. Is there anything else you would like us to document while we are out there? Do you have any questions?

This catchy creature on an Annual Fleabane at Stars of the Meadow Farm is actually a type of cuckoo wasp – it usurps the nurseries of certain other ground-nesting wasps.

What We’ve Found So Far: Flowers on the Farms in June

We found more than 200 species of flowers on eight of the farms (unfortunately, Claudia was unable to get to Stars of the Meadow Farm in June; Conrad did tally insects on flowers but the vegetation wasn’t mapped in detail). The most diverse group of flowers on the farms, with 83 species, were the non-native, cultivated plants. These included cover crops (such as Buckwheat or clovers, vetch and pea species), cut flowers (such as Zinnias, Snapdragons, and Marigolds), vegetables that need to bloom in order to produce the crop we eat (such as Tomatoes, Peppers, Squash and Cucumbers), as well as culinary herbs and leafy greens allowed to set flowers (such as Dill, Cilantro, Arugala, and other brassicas). Almost equally diverse, with 80 species, were the non-native wild-growing plants (“weeds”), which included ten species considered invasive in our region (such as Canada Thistle, two species of knapweeds, and Ground Ivy). Flowers were also found of 32 native wild-growing species (for example, Annual Fleabane, Common Yellow Wood Sorrel, and Common Milkweed) and on 18 native species cultivated for cut flowers (such as Fringed Loosestrife, Foxglove Beardtongue and several species of mountain-mints).

A small group of flowers were found at all nine farms. These ubiquitous flowers were Annual Fleabane, Narrow-leaved Plantain, Red Clover, White Clover, Wild Madder (aka Common Bedstraw), and Common Wood Sorrel.

A green sweat bee takes a pollen bath on English Plantain at Rose Hill.

The following graph illustrates just how different the eight farms visited by Claudia were in terms of their flowers. Only the six species just mentioned were found on all eight farms she visited in June (and in fact, they were all also observed at Stars of the Meadow in July) . A few additional species were shared by more than four farms, while 133 flower species were found at only a single farm.

What We’ve Found So Far: Flower Abundance within Management Units and across Habitat Categories in June

The following map shows a color-coding of the study units at each farm by rank in flower abundance, increasing from zero (no flowers), to A (rare flowers), B (medium density of flowers), C (flowers common), to D (flowers abundant). (Again, Stars of the Meadow is missing from these maps this time around, but will be added in July and subsequent months.)

We only assigned the highest flower abundance rank D to five fields/management units in June: four of them were mature fallow fields (tilled within the last year or two, but not yet managed in 2025), of which three were dominated by the flowers of Daisy Fleabane and one by Wild Madder (Common Bedstraw). The fifth was a Buckwheat cover crop in full bloom.

When comparing the flower abundance ranks assigned to the most common habitats we surveyed, we see that, in addition to mature fallow fields and mature cover crops, some of which reached very high flower densities, the habitat with the most consistently high density of flowers was mature field edge. Wild habitats, managed flowers, and fencelines sometimes also had a lot of flowers, but sometimes not very many. Early in the season, beds with crop flowers were quite variable in their flower abundance and still had overall relatively few flowers.

A Honey Bee with bright orange ‘panniers’ of Asparagus pollen at Whistledown Farm.

What We’ve Found So Far: Flower Diversity within the Management Units and across Habitat Categories in June

The following map shows a color-coding of the study units at each of the eight farms by number of species in flower (which did not always correlate with the abundance of flowers).

We found the most diverse (species-rich) flower communities in mature field edges and mature fallow fields. Most wild areas also had diverse flower communities, but some did not (at least not in June).

What We’ve Found So Far: Which Insects Like Which Flowers?

The ‘mouth’ of a snapdragon (at Treadlight) is opened to reveal a small sweat bee hidden inside. Doing an accurate visual count of visitors to snapdragons is nearly impossible.

Before summarizing the insect results, let us tell you some of the reasons these data should be taken with a grain of salt:

Our approach is based on seeing insects on flowers. This means both that smaller, less conspicuous insects surely tend to go unseen and that insects entering closed flowers like snapdragons or dangling flowers, like those of Potatoes or Horse Nettle, are unreported because they were hidden from view. Furthermore, while the stopwatch of our visual surveys only ran while our eyes were inspecting flowers, there is no doubt that more flowers (and hence potentially more insects) were observed when those flowers were growing in tight clusters than when they were growing as singlets or small clumps. Finally, the ‘ripeness’ of flowers (that is, how much nectar and pollen they are offering) is not always immediately apparent. If you spend time watching flowers, you’ll notice that, even within a single flower species, the attractiveness seems to vary across dates and even within days. For the more common flowers, we have data from multiple dates and several different farms and our averaging might iron out some of the flukes; however, some flowers were only observed for one 5-minute block on one farm and what we saw then is what you get. All this adds ‘noise’ that might confound actual patterns…

But, with these caveats in mind, what did we find?

The top-ranking flowers for each insect group.

In this table, the number indicates the value of the given flower relative to the average of all flowers observed in June. For example, Viper’s Bugloss was more than 15 times as popular for Bumble Bees as the average flower. Only flowers 1.5 times or more above average are listed. Colors just highlight the same flower on different lists. You can expect these numbers to change somewhat as the season progresses and we collect more observations.

The above table shows the top flowers for each group of insect visitors. A few general comments are worth making: the same flower can differ markedly in apparent attractiveness for the different groups of flower visitors. For example, while Pasture Rose ranked second for Bumble Bees, Arugala ranked first for Honey Bees, White Lace Flower was tops for Hover Flies, and Oxeye Daisy was in second place for ‘other bees’, none of these flowers even appeared on the lists of the other insect groups. At the same time, some flowers, like Viper’s Bugloss, Chicory, and Echinacea appeared on three or even all of the lists. While the reason for the preference differences amongst the insect groups is not always clear, certain patterns might be discernible. For example, if one compares the flowers favored by Bumble Bees and Hover Flies, one notes that, relatively speaking, the Hover Flies seemed to favor shallower, smaller flowers. Perhaps we’ll be able to tease apart more of such patterns as we collect more data.

A Honey Bee on a Tiger Lily at the Hudson Valley Seed Company.

Native vs. non-native and intentionally seeded vs. spontaneous don’t seem to be great predictors of most favored flower status. For instance, Viper’s Bugloss and Chicory are non-native ‘weeds’, Arugala and Asian Greens are non-native crops, Common Milkweed and Annual Fleabane are native ‘weeds’, Bachelor Button is a non-native ornamental seeded flower, and Echinacea is a native (or ‘near native’) ornamental seeded flower. All of these flowers figured at or near the top of some insect lists. Of course, our gross categories of flower visitors may hide more specialized relationships as was evidenced by our sighting of Macropis bees, a native bee specializing on planted but native Lysmachia (aka our native Loosestrifes). These bees collect the oils that such flowers produce.

A specialist Macropis bee gathering oily pollen from a seeded Fringed Loosestrife at Treadlight Farm. This is one example of specific relationships that are hidden in the general insect categories we use.

What We’ve Found So Far: Mapping Flower Suitability.

Finally, we present a series of maps showing the predicted pollinator value of each management unit on each farm. Please note these are NOT maps of where we necessarily saw the most bees, instead they’re predictive maps showing our guesses as to which patches were most attractive to the different groups based on flower composition and our flower visitor data. A logical extension of our work would be to test our models by going into each management unit and gathering an activity index for each of our flower visitor groups. Because of their crudity and the non-floral factors that can affect bee abundance (listed above in the Background section), these June maps are very much only part of a larger picture and may or may not reflect the insect abundance you observe.

In these maps a darker tone means more of the given insect group. For a given farm, each frame is a different insect group.

We realize that, unless you are familiar with the individual farm, these maps are somewhat hard to interpret. We will try to provide more individual farm details in our next blog but, in the meantime, some general patterns seem evident:

Predicted suitability can be quite patchy – attractive beds or patches abut less attractive ones. There’s nothing surprising about that given the obvious variation in flower composition across beds. Perhaps somewhat more interesting is the fact that the patterns vary depending upon the focal insect group. This derives directly from the previously described variation in insect suitability amongst flowers and the patterns of flower composition across units.

Both farm beds and edges, as well as fallows and semi-natural areas can be valuable. Flower visitors are constantly trying to make the best choices from the flower smorgasbord available to them, and these maps suggest that those offerings will lead them into suitable patches regardless of where on a farm their favored flowers are found – for example, contrast where one is likely to find flowering Arugala with where one finds Milkweed (two of the Honey Bee’s favorites).

It’s important to highlight what these maps DON’T show – were we to map suitability for particular bee species, these maps would sometimes be very different. For example, there are native bees who only feed at particular Spring ephemerals; maps of habitat suitability for these species would essentially be completely empty given that none of the beds on any of the farms supported those flowers. Likewise, a map of flower suitability for the Squash Bee would largely (but not entirely) be a map of squash beds. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the common members of each of the multispecies groups (Honey Bees are only one species) are single species with broad tastes – maps of their suitability might not differ too much from what is shown here. In between these extremes come the tastes of slightly more specialized bees. For example, in our current July round of visits, we found Mellisodes bimaculatus (a bee that looks somewhat like a black bumble bee with two white patches on its tail end) going to town on corn tassels at Ironewood while it was absent from most other flowers at that farm on that day.  Likewise, Hyleaus, a genus of somewhat wasp-like bees, has so far seemed to show a marked preference for certain shallow flowers like Queen Anne’s Lace. In other words, our gross groups hide subtler patterns. We are trying to refine our insect categories, but will probably have to continue to rely on this somewhat anecdotal approach for the nuances.

Death on Spotted Knapweed at Treadlight Farm – a pair of Ambush Bugs mate while one feeds on a Honey Bee they have captured; a fly also appears to have taken an interest in the dead bee.

Final Thunks.

Seeded flowers have value in addition to the support of insects – they have general aesthetic appeal, may be part of a commercial operation growing retail flowers, or may serve as an added pick-your-own perk for CSA members. Sometimes flowers are included as companion plantings meant to help control certain pests and, finally, certain crops are sometimes allowed to flower because it is necessary for food production (e.g., tomatoes and cucurbits) or the farmer wants to harvest their own seeds. (Of course, leaving leftovers to flower is also done as an easy way to augment local blossoms). Clearly, the results presented here are not the only way to judge the value of on-farm flowers, but we hope that if flowers for insects is one of your goals, then our observations might be useful.

Going forward, we are into our July round of visits and it is fun to see new species of flowers and bees interacting in new ways. It seems safe to say that the July round of maps will show different patterns from the June ones, but we’re also curious to see if there’s any consistency. In the meantime, if any of the above observations raise questions or provoke observations, we’d enjoy hearing them. And we always enjoy hearing of neat flowers or insects you spot!

A Zabulon Skipper on Bird/Hairy Vetch at Ironwood Farm.

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A Taste of What We’re Up To.

by Conrad.

One of our small, native bees on Daisy Fleabane.

We’ve begun our Summer bumbling (both because we’re still trying to find our way methodologically and because I’m counting bumble bees). Basically, on each of your farms, Claudia and I outline a portion, often with your input, that we’re going to focus on. Within that portion, Claudia maps management units (for example, different beds or edge situations) and tallies the flowers, giving them each a general abundance rank. I then follow and count flower visitors at each of the most common types of flowers that Claudia has noted. I wander around generally spending five minutes with my eyes on a given flower species (I use a stop watch so that if I have to walk between flower patches or want to take a photo, that time is not included in my survey).

So far, I have spent almost six hours looking at flowers and the graph below illustrates the results to date:

So, for example, Asparagus was the favored Honey Bee flower so far, Coreopsis had the most “other bees” (these are wild, mostly native bees excluding bumble bees), Bumble Bees were most common at the Beard Tongue, and hover flies seemed to like Asian Greens gone to flower.

There are lots of reasons to be critical of these results: five minutes of wandering flower watches can encompass widely varying numbers of individual flowers; flower ‘ripeness’ may also vary widely with some flowers that make look fine to us being long past prime nectar production; these data come from farms which may have quite different bee communities; and, although I have standardized for number of minutes of observation, the actual total number of minutes any one species was observed varies from 20 or more minutes for Annual Fleabane, White Clover, and Red Clover and only about three and half minutes for Pasture Rose (we have, for example, only observed flowering Asparagus at one farm for five minutes).

Nonetheless, if you have a moment, please take a look at these results and let us know how they mesh with your own observations. Which flowers do you usually think of as ‘bee-full’?

Once we finish the first round of farm visits, we’ll be posting a more detailed account.

What I’m guessing is a Brown-belted Bumblebee on Pasture Rose.
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What’s ahead?

May showers bring….?

Just a brief update for any of you who are following us –

This season, the Circle fieldwork will focus on two projects. One will work with participating farmers to understand their little-used nooks and crannies. Where are these? What role do they already play in the farm’s functioning? What future role might they be able to play in the farm’s agroecology? Somewhat related to this, our second project will compare the flower abundance and bee life of intentional on-farm flower plantings with that of adjacent wilder edges or fallows sporting spontaneous flowers. What do the intentional plantings offer that the edges or fallows don’t and vice-versa?

We plan to return to active blog posting as our field season ramps up, so please stay tuned.

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The Birds of Rose Hill

By Will

Peruse any aerial photograph of the Hudson Valley from the 1960s and you will see field after field dotted with fruit trees, their neat rows show up as pointillist parcels in even the most blurry photos. There used to be a lot of commercial orchards in the Hudson Valley. Several successful commercial orchards still remain in what is today a very difficult and competitive agro-economy, but New York is no longer the Big Apple and much of its market share has been overtaken by the irrigated apples of Washington state, New Zealand, and other far-flung places. The regional commercial orchards that persist today are either ruthlessly efficient or creative in their direct marketing to tourists and visitors.

This photo (Livingston, Columbia County) shows the extent to which orchards once dominated “hedgerow to hedgerow” on many farms. 1965.

To be truthful, most commercial orchards in the Hudson Valley do not rise to the top of my list as places to see birds, which is why the bird diversity of Rose Hill was a refreshing surprise.

For birds to survive they need places to roost and rest, insects in May to replenish their exhausted bodies after typically long migrations, places to build nests free from disturbance, and still more insects in June and July to feed their rapidly developing offspring. Most commercial orchards are some of the most intensively managed farmscapes in the Hudson Valley. Many pesticides (both organic and conventional) are necessary to raise the high-quality fruit that consumers demand. It’s been over 50 years since Joni Mitchell proudly sang that she can live with “spots on her apples” but we have a long way to go to convince most American consumers that the tradeoff is worth it for a healthier ecosystem. Our changing regional climate, with its warmer springs still punctuated with snap freezes, and new invasive pests in the pipeline (Brown-Marmorated Stinkbug the newest arrival and Spotted Lanternfly at our doorstep) don’t make things any easier.

I’ll let Rose Hill speak for themselves on their growing practices and philosophy, but as a visiting farmer and ornithologist, a few key features stood out:

  1. Mechanical (rather than chemical) removal of weeds under trees at a reduced rate that provide a lot of structural plant diversity within orchard rows.
  2. Reduced spray schedule and use of non- or less-toxic spray alternatives
  3. Retention of landforms in orchard blocks (vegetated shale ridges, for example)
  4. Adjacent blocks of native vegetation.

The vegetated strips between trees that cannot be reached by mowers provides spaces for pollinators, and for insect prey that birds depend upon. This structural heterogeneity is closer to the appearance of Hudson Valley orchards in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Rather than bulldozing and infilling shale ridges, Rose Hill has left them in place providing important micro shelters and feeding zones for birds.

The savannah-like structure of orchards actually attract a few species of birds who preferentially nest in the grassy matrix of trees.

I find that one of the most common orchard birds, which nests directly in fruit trees, can thrive when spray programs are kept to a minimum. The Eastern Kingbird is a type of flycatcher that builds a grassy cup in the fork of a tree branch that looks like a Disney cartoon of a nest. They are famously aggressive towards other birds and mammals (but oddly, not humans). On a spring day when you look up and see some smaller songbird attacking and chasing a Red-tailed Hawk and think, wow, that bird has chutzpah, chances are that it’s an Eastern Kingbird.

Chris Franks shared this image of a local Eastern Kingbird. These birds perch conspicuously on wires and the tops of trees sallying forth for large flying insects. They have a white band on their tails that identifies the bird in flight even from a distance without binoculars.

Cedar Waxwings often nest in orchards as well. On my farm, I typically see them nesting in plums and early peaches, constructing their nests just as the harvest is winding down. They rarely bother to eat peaches and large fruit but can be considered a management challenge in cherry and small-berry crops. There are plenty of native species of fruit that these birds frequent, and yes, as the name implies, they eat Eastern Red Cedar (juniper) berries, as well as serviceberries, wild grape, hawthorn, and winter berry. Many fruit-eating birds separate the flesh and seeds in their crops and regurgitate the seeds, but waxwing digestion shunts both the pulp and seeds through their bodies and they are a key species for spreading many fruiting trees and shrubs (they can also spread less desirable invasive species such as Japanese Honeysuckle and Multiflora Rose). Sometimes in the fall when fruits such as wild grape partially ferment and produce alcohol the birds can become intoxicated and fly awkwardly.

The “waxy” red tips on the wings, yellow tail band and raccoon mask of the Cedar Waxwing are unmistakable. Their song, if you can call it much of one, is an almost an inaudible high pitched trill. Photo: Chris Franks

The aptly named Orchard Oriole, seen in the apricot orchard at Rose Hill, has a brick-red chest (unlike the tangerine orange of the far more common Baltimore Oriole). They feed on fruit, flowers, nectar, and insects and unusual for orioles, sometimes nest communally in appropriate habitat. The 60-plus-year-old records of the Alan Devoe Bird Club has shown this species increasing in our area for unknown reasons. It may be due to the current successional sweet spot in the Hudson Valley with many young forests and abandoned orchards that provide the structure this species favors without the intensive pesticide use. I never find them in modern commercial orchards and its presence at Rose Hill was a surprise, although my visit in mid July is at the end of their breeding cycle and this individual could have been a migrant on its way back to Central America.

Marian Sole shared this image of a local male Orchard Oriole. Like all orioles, it has a rich lilting complex song.

This lightly managed section of the orchard edge (with native vegetation on the opposite side of the fence) was a “birdy” section of the farm and contained a Common Yellowthroat nest with young.

This female Common Yellowthroat foraged for insects in a young planting of plums. Close enough for my iPhone!

Common Yellowthroats are small yellow-olive warblers that nest in brushy tangles and like to be near water. They are a common bird in our area the summer and their ‘whitchity-whitchity-whitchity’ song is a familiar sound if you train your ear to recognize it. They frequently struggle with brood parasitism from another native species, the Brown-headed Cowbirds. Cowbirds do not construct their own nests, but rather like Eurasian Cuckoos, they lay a single egg in the nests of other birds and abandon them for the host bird to raise. Their hatching offspring grow at a fast rate and therefore elbow the lion’s share of the incoming insect food from parents which seem instinctually inclined to shove food into any open mouth regardless of species.

This is a two-way evolutionary race, however, and some populations of Common Yellowthroat have learned to recognize the cowbird’s egg and will build a layer of grass overtop it to isolate it. If that fails, they may abandon the nest and attempt to renest completely at a great cost of energy. The North American Breeding Bird Survey has documented a 26 percent loss of Common Yellowthroats in North America since 1966, probably due to habitat loss. Farms can be essential places for these birds since the unmowed edges, unused fields or the vegetation around irrigation ponds can be more than enough habitat for this species to successfully raise young. A few have learned to use more heavily vegetated suburban yards. You don’t need a lot of land to attract and retain this species, but they can’t eke out a living on mowed lawns dotted with ornamental shrubs–they need a patch of rank growth.

Rose Hill has a wonderful planting of blueberries as part of their U-Pick offerings. The mature plants were heavy with berries on the July morning I visited and although they were not open for customers, more than 30 birds helped themselves to the berries in the patch. American Robins, Gray Catbirds, and Baltimore Orioles dominated the flock, with a smattering of Eastern Towhees, Northern Mockingbird, and a Brown Thrasher. I’ve talked to growers with divergent views on netting berries to prevent birds, some swear it’s essential and others feel there is plenty to go around. I’ve found that birds can nearly wipe out small plantings of a 50 bushes or less, but larger blocks seem to satiate the robbers and leave plenty for us.

This planting of blueberries hosted 5-6 species of birds attracted to the free fruit

The former name of the Eastern Towhee is the aptly named Rufous-Sided Towhee. Related to sparrows, this is a common bird of scrublands and early successional forests. They scratch through leaf litter with a two foot hop, pouncing on exposed insects. They commonly add fruit to their diet as well

In a month these sunflowers will attract pollinators and if left to go to seed, a calorie-rich seed for a variety of birds

So many of the fruits that we expect and enjoy at commercial orchards — from peaches to apricots, apples to pears, are eurasian imports to North America, non-natives that require a lot of skill and work to bring to fruitfulness and profit. That Rose Hill has managed to do all of this and still leave patches on their farm to attract native birds and other organisms is deliberate proof that this complex relationship of native and non-native, cultivated and fallow, management and benign neglect, can yield positive ecological relationships. All of us who farm and care about wildlife are searching for our own models to achieve something akin to a balance of what we take from nature and what we leave.

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The Birds of Blue Star

By Will

On June 12 I visited Blue Star Farm and documented breeding evidence for the following birds:

  • American Robin (Feeding Young)
  • Carolina Wren (Territorial Singing)
  • Chipping Sparrow (Nest with Young)
  • Common Yellowthroat (Territorial Singing)
  • Gray Catbird (Feeding Young)
  • Indigo Bunting (Feeding Young)
  • Killdeer (Fledgling)
  • Pileated Woodpecker (Territorial drumming)
  • Red-eyed Vireo (Territorial Singing)
  • Red-winged Blackbird (Feeding Young)
  • Song Sparrow (Nest with Young)
  • Warbling Vireo (Feeding Young)
  • Wood Thrush (Feeding Young)
  • Yellow Warbler (Feeding Young)

Each section of Blue Star Farm contained unique habitats that hosted a variety of farm and edge-loving species of birds.

Native shrubs such as Staghorn Sumac and large legacy Sugar Maples planted long ago shared space with common non-natives such as Buckthorn, Autumn Olive, and Japanese Honeysuckle (all fruiting shrubs that attract birds) between the farm’s vegetable fields and the main road. Northern Cardinals and Gray Catbirds fed on berries as a Northern Flicker, a yellow-spotted medium woodpecker, investigated nesting cavities in the mature Sugar Maples.

Weediness is a given in most vegetable production systems and they are often the top management challenge. My farm, despite my best efforts to cultivate and hand weed, is often a riot of weeds and I’m slowly learning to make peace with that. Weeds, that catch-all term for an uninvited variety of herbaceous surprises in crop zones, can and often do rob crops of critical moisture and nutrients, but they often include many seed-bearing grasses and forbs that attract insect prey for birds, serve as cover for nesting sites, and feed many ground-feeding sparrows, particularly in fall and winter.

Weeds can be a particular problem for organic farmers because there are limited options available to chemically control them. ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care,’ is old country advice for dealing with weeds, advising farmers to stay on top of weeds early or else suffer the consequences. A farming manual I have from 1915 has slightly more bellicose advice: “Man must wage continual warfare against weeds should he wish to prevail.”

Just how much weediness a farm can endure depends on the tolerance of the crop and a lot on the time, resources, and philosophy of the grower. I find weeds are most prevalent during dry years (those fast-growing annual weeds seem to thrive in conditions when cultivated crops struggle to keep up). I find that most crops can handle some weediness once they are established and if mowed out shortly after harvest, the weed seed load is mitigated. Like so many things in life, timing is everything.

At Blue Star, A Song Sparrow built a nest in a weedy tangle at the edge of black plastic mulch. An adult foraged for small beetles along the edge of the mulch and noticing me it paused on a spray of Lambsquarter. I stayed motionless until its instinct to feed its young overcame its instinct to be wary of this large mammal. Red-winged Blackbirds perched on the tomato stakes nearby and Chipping Sparrows foraged in the Clover-Wheat cover crops adjacent to the vegetable patch.

I heard a familiar rollicking whistle overhead and noticed a pair of Ospreys flying overhead

The Osprey or Fish Hawk have rough scaled feet perfect for grabbing and holding onto fish plucked from the water

The two fish-eating raptors seemed out of place on a farm, but here in Stuyvesant the Hudson River is a short distance away. Osprey are just starting to nest again in the middle stretches of the Hudson River Valley. They commonly breed downstate and on Long Island and populations nest on lakes at the foothills of the Adirondacks, but for decades they were not present as breeders in the Hudson Valley even as Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles (other raptors recovering from DDT poisoning) repopulated historic ranges.

Their absence was long a local ornithological mystery. In the 1980s students from Columbia-Greene Community College erected nesting platforms on the Hudson River to entice them to settle here, but Ospreys are famously uncritical about where they build nests, and lack of nesting sites was probably not the limiting factor. In Florida, they commonly appropriate power line posts, commercial signs, and even flat roofs in developed areas. Perhaps the population just needed to build up over time to infill suitable habitats. Few things authenticate a large body of water better than an Osprey and its dramatic hover and dive to catch fish. I’m always amazed at how quickly local bird populations can wax and wane within the span of a human life.

A single Wild Turkey launched out and flew noisily from a cover crop patch of rye and wheat into the distant woodlot. Turkeys are another great success story in our area, benefiting both from regrowing forests and reintroduction programs. Victims of habitat loss and overhunting in the early 20th Century, they are now common throughout the Hudson Valley and have even adapted to suburban yards. They are one of two native North American birds that have been domesticated (the other is the Muscovy Duck of Mexico). Spanish explorers sent the Turkey back to Europe in the 1500s where they were further domesticated and spread throughout Europe. English colonists a century later brought them back “home” to North America. Wild Turkeys are found in all states except Alaska (yes, there are even wild introduced populations in the upper elevations of Hawaii!).

I hear the gulping distinctive “KOWP KOWP KOWP” song of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo just to the north of the farm in the old woodlot. 2024 has been a banner year for our two native species of Cuckoo, the Black-billed and Yellow-billed as their regional populations follow outbreaks of hairy caterpillars. The large outbreak of Spongy Moth caterpillars in Columbia County and Duchess County has attracted migrating cuckoos to our area and provided an abundance of easy prey. Cuckoos are some of the only birds able to digest Spongy Moth caterpillars and they can eat more than 100 of them at a time, so many in fact, that the caterpillar hairs become matted into a digestive felt inside the cuckoo’s stomach inhibiting its ability to absorb nutrients. Cuckoos are among the few birds in North America able to feed heavily on hairy caterpillars and have evolved the ability to regurgitate their entire stomach lining and grow a fresh one anew. Although the cuckoos barely put a dent in the spongy moth populations, the spongy moths are a boon for the cuckoos which gain the extra nutrition to lay multiple clutches of eggs.

Cuckoos can be incredibly difficult to see when perched. They are masters at remaining perfectly still and they keep their wings tucked tight when foraging. Mike Birmingham captured this wonderful image of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo on an exposed perch.

The edge between the unmoved pastures and adjacent woodlot hosted several species of forest and edge-adapted species including American Crow, American Goldfinch, Common Yellowthroat, Eastern Wood Pewee, Gray Catbird, Great-crested Flycatcher, Pileated Woodpecker, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Red-eyed Vireo, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Song Sparrow, Warbling Vireo, White-breasted Nuthatch, and Wood Thrush

This stunning image of a local Wood Thrush was captured by Chris Franks. Wood Thrushes require at least some undisturbed woodland. Although they have survived forest fragmentation better than other woodland thrushes, their numbers have still declined by half in the last fifty years in New York State.

One hotspot of bird activity at Blue Star is the farm pond that lies to the north of their vegetable plots. Many farms in our region build fewer ponds these days as soil and water district grants have dried up, the importance of ponds for watering livestock has declined with the overall decline in animal agriculture, and many vegetable operations now opt for wells and drip irrigation. Homeowners still build ponds for aesthetic reasons, but new pond construction on farms is now rare. Nevertheless, a multitude of legacy ponds dot the Hudson Valley and can serve as oases for birds.

Blue Star’s pond hosted two territories of Song Sparrow, a pair of Red-winged Blackbirds, Barn Swallows, and several Yellow Warblers that caught some unidentified beetles at the waters edge to feed their young in adjacent willows. A small clan of Killdeer, black-and-white inland shorebirds, foraged along the pond’s muddy edge. While the nearby Hudson River is ancient, natural ponds are recent landscape features and quite rare because the fate of most ponds are to fill in quickly over time. The intentional disturbance created by pond construction in the last two centuries has provided a wealth of habitat value for our area. Are there ponds on your farm or property? If so, how long has it been there and what sorts of organisms does it host?

Not all disturbances are net negative events for wildlife. The sad looking oaks defoliated by Spongy Moths throughout the Hudson Valley this June have generated the highest populations of cuckoos I’ve ever seen and the oaks will surely rebound. The soil disturbances associated with Blue Star’s vegetable production created a flush of annual weed seeds now enjoyed by sparrows and their farm pond has produced the insects feeding a variety of native song birds. How to we measure ‘creative destruction’ and gauge how some disturbance is valuable or harmful? What values do we bring to that question and how does it affect the management decisions we make?

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The Birds of Little Seed

The diversity of habitats in such a compact area, including a stream and riparian zone, upland pasture, hedgerows, weedy field margins, and vegetated crop zones permit many species of birds to coexist with the farming practices of Little Seed.

On a bright sunny morning on 17 June I was able to document breeding evidence for the following species at Little Seed

  • American Redstart (Feeding Young)
  • Bank Swallow (Used Nest)
  • Belted Kingfisher (Used Nest)
  • Chestnut-sided Warbler (Fledgling)
  • Common Grackle (Fledgling)
  • Common Yellowthroat (Singing territorially)
  • Eastern Kingbird (Feeding Young)
  • Field Sparrow (Fledgling)
  • Gray Catbird (Carrying Food for Young)
  • Indigo Bunting (Singing territorially)
  • Killdeer (Fledgling)
  • Northern Rough-winged Swallow (Fledgling)
  • Red-eyed Vireo (Carrying Food for Young)
  • Red-winged Blackbird (Fledgling)
  • Savannah Sparrow (Singing territorially)
  • Spotted Sandpiper (Singing territorially)
  • Song Sparrow (Fledgling and Nest with Eggs)
  • Warbling Vireo (Singing territorially).
  • Wood Duck (Fledgling)

As Conrad and Cladia described in their post, one of the most ecologically interesting and unique features of this farm is the stream and riparian edge that runs adjacent to the farm’s pastures. In addition to looking like a well-used and marvelous swimming hole, the stream and shorelines hosted a variety of interesting birds.

The pebble beach and distant exposed stream banks hosted several range-restricted riparian species of birds

The silt embankment of the stream provided nesting sites for three species of birds that take advantage of this specialized habitat. Bank Swallows, aptly named for their tendency to dig into the soft silt/sand edges of watercourses to form communal nesting cavities were present. Northern Rough-winged Swallows (that often nest as single pairs rather than in groups) also called this section of the stream home.

The red arrow points to one of the excavated cavities of a Bank Swallow nest. Bank Swallows were present flying over the creek, but this particular nest is likely abandoned, perhaps picked up by another cavity nester such as the Northern Rough-Winged Swallow. Bank Swallow colonies are inherently ephemeral, taking advantage of recently exposed banks due to flooding or erosion. Bank Swallows have been documented nesting in human-altered gravel banks and sand mines when natural habitat is unavailable.

This Bank Swallow was photographed by Mike Birmingham in the Hudson Valley. Like all swallows, its long wings allow it the great aerial performance necessary to chase and catch flying insects. Bank Swallows arrive to the Hudson Valley in May and depart to Central America in late August and September when flying insect biomass begins to decreases here locally.

The larger cavity to the left was recently used by a Belted Kingfisher, a much larger fish-eating crested bird that also nests in exposed embankments. This nest looks like it was also used in a previous season. Fresh nests show two clean groves where the adult kingfisher drags its feet as it enters and exits. A variety of mammals will renovate and inhabit this kind of valuable real estate when the breeding season ends.

An adult Wood Duck, another cavity nester, swam past on the creek with seven recently fledged ducklings in tow. Ducklings are a classic example of precocial young, meaning that shortly after they hatch they are mobile and able to explore and feed. Contrast these young swimmers with the pink, blind and helpless young of an American Robin (which are altricial young) that must be fed and kept warm to survive. Wood Ducks nest in cavities, but as their name implies, inside the cavities of trees rather than soil embankments. Sometimes suitable nesting holes can be so scarce that multiple females will lay in the same cavity creating super clutches of forty or more young. As soon as the birds are hatched and mobile they exit the cavity (sometimes falling 20 or 30 feet to the ground). Wood Duck chicks have a layer of fat that cushions the fall as they don’t always drop into the water from their nesting trees!

A drake (male) Wood Duck photographed by Mike Birmingham. Wood Ducks are examples of short-distant migrants. They typically leave the Hudson Valley in December but don’t go too far, finding open water in the Mid-Atlantic States. They return earlier than most migrants as well, typically showing up in the Hudson Valley in March. More than 100 years of data have shown us that as the climate warms, Wood Ducks linger here longer in the fall and arrive earlier in spring, often returning in February now, 2-3 weeks earlier than average.

In the pasture adjacent to the stream, three species of early breeding birds are already wrapping up the year’s nesting cycle. Red-winged Blackbirds fly in mixed age flocks in the pasture. They alight and drop back down into the grasses like rain. Common Grackles and their recently fledged soft gray young join them. These small flocks begin as the association of a few dozen breeding pairs. As the summer draws to a close these local flocks aggregate, joining others of their own species and and perhaps too by European Starlings and Brown-headed Cowbirds, sometimes reaching numbers in the tens of thousands. Birds of a Feather Flock Together, so the proverb goes, but in this literal sense the ecological needs of these bird change. In the summer, males aggressively defend individual territories. The proud red flash of a Red-winged Blackbird is designed in part to keep others away from their nesting territories. As breeding season ends, however, and their sexual hormones diminish, the value of so many neighbors becomes an essential survival tool. Many eyes can quickly spot predators and the dodge and weave of a large flock of blackbirds confuses their assailants. There is safety in numbers.

Some of the more experienced Red-Wing Blackbirds will raise a second clutch, but the bulk of breeding is already over just as the summer solstice arrives. Other species of birds, like the pair of American Goldfinch that fly over the pasture, are just forming their pair bonds and attracting mates, not yet ready to lay eggs. They will gather together nests of spider webs and milkweed silk embroidered with lichens as the first apples of the Hudson Valley are picked. Each species of bird has its own season and rhythm.

Tree Swallows, a third early breeder also flies over the stream near the pasture. These iridescent blue-green, white-bellied swallows nest in tree cavities just like Wood Ducks. Placing a bluebird box next to a water course is almost certain to attract them. They are the first swallows to arrive to the Hudson Valley each year, typically in March, and the last to leave. Unusual for migrants, they have a long season locally after their breeding cycle. In early July they perch crowded on local power lines and those flocks always remind me of the pivotal moment when summer has peaked and we begin the long slow walk to winter. They seem to be able to eke out a living when other species of swallows have long departed and it’s not impossible to see them in our area as late as October.

On many conventional farms, active cropping areas typically have low bird diversity, but the unmanaged edges at Little Seed provide habitat for birds even in places that are heavily travelled and used for production.

The seeding grasses in and around these plastic tunnel greenhouses provide enough habitat for sparrows to nest and feed.

Song Sparrows are particularly good at finding small breeding niches in weedy field margins and hedgerows when given the chance. They are true omnivores feeding on a variety of insect prey, seeds, and fruits.

As their name implies, Song Sparrows have complex — and to our ears, pleasant — songs that they sing over and over to define and defend their territories.

Even the seasonal weeds that grow up around equipment storage sties can be an oasis for sparrows and other birds

Fenceposts can be important feeding sites for birds. An Eastern Bluebird (that just dived out of view of my camera!) used this post to ambush and pounce down onto insects below.

Brush piles can be essential cover for sparrows and other birds, particularly in the winter when the lack of leaves makes many small birds easy targets for aerial predators.

As an ecologically minded farmer, I often ask myself the question: Is it better to provide wildlife habitat on my farm by encouraging more undisturbed and fallow land, or should I work harder to integrate spaces for wildlife in and among my cropping areas? Little Seed clearly demonstrated both solutions. And although, I’m not sure there is ever a firm answer to this question, or if I have even framed it correctly, I left the farm thinking more and more about these two approaches.

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Beetles by the Creek: A Snapshot from the Hudson Valley Seed Company.

The rocky shore of the North Peters Kill, prime habitat for certain ground beetles.

by Conrad.

Sorry, but the field season, got in the way of our best intentions of keeping this blog ‘live’. We have now made most of our farm visits and over the next couple of months plan to post the reports of those visits here, albeit two-three months behind the times! As a little teaser, this is a short profile of some of the beetles we found by the North Peters Kill, which runs along the southwest edge of Hudson Valley Seed Company’s Airport Rd property in Accord, NY. We made this visit on 6 Sept. 2024.

As some of you may know, ground beetles and I go back a long way together. I first got interested in ground beetles when we were doing a floodplain forest study many years ago – such forests and the associated stream banks tend to have a diversity of ground beetles, and so they can be used to assess forest ‘condition’. Later, as we started doing more agroecology work, the ground beetle interest turned to the question ‘how can these purported beneficials be encouraged on farms?’. We currently have various projects related to that question at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub.

However, as they say, it’s nice to get back to ones roots…

While snooping along the rock margins of the North Peters Kill, I came across an appealing cross-section of stream-bank ground beetles. With a few exceptions, stream-bank ground beetles rarely venture into agricultural fields, so I won’t claim that the beetles profiled here are somehow integral to sustainable agriculture; I just want to make the case that, in their own little ways, they’re exquisite.

First, before talking beetles, imagine this stream-edge habitat. Rocks sit waist deep in water, ‘fertilized’ by whatever periodically washes downstream or grows in this moist, often sunny, environment. This is prime habitat for scavengers who feed directly on the flotsam and rock fuzz (that’s NOT a scientific term!) and for predators feeding on those scavengers. Largely but not completely missing are those banner scavengers, the ants.

Among the other invertebrates who seem to appreciate these haunts are spiders.
Here, a wolf spider mother carries her egg sac across wet rocks. Once they hatch, the young spiders will ride their mother’s back for a while before striking out on their own. Who said only vertebrates exhibit maternal care?
This appears to be a firefly grub; these forage for soft-bodied invertz.

The stereotypical ground beetle is an elongate, black oval with relatively long legs and a propensity to scurry. And some creekside ground beetles do fit the mold. Agonum is a genus of ground beetles which includes, but is not limited to, a range of medium-sized, relatively nondescript (until you get out the microscope) beetles of wetter areas.

This probable Agonum was about 1/4″ long. This species seemed to be the most common ground beetle of these rocks – quickly running off when I lifted stones. This may be an omnivore, scavenging on vegetable matter and preying on smaller creatures.

But more exotic beetles may lurk beneath the rocks….

True, no ground beetles in this picture, but that brown stain on my thumb is a chemical burn left by the defensive actions of a Bombardier Beetle.

Bombardier Beetles, like many other ‘noxious’ (at least to their would-be predators) insects are conspicuous. Their colors say, “Eat me and you’ll regret it.”. Inside their bodies are two chemicals which, when mixed together, become a very caustic substance. When irritated, the beetles combine these two chemicals and squirt the new compound out the directional nozzle on their rear ends. (For videos of this in action, go to 3 mins into this BBC clip.) The burn on my thumb came when I picked up a Bombardier Beetle. There was a faint “Ffffft” and a base-ball sized cloud of vapor which left this ‘wound’ on my thumb. I didn’t feel anything but I wouldn’t want to be a bird who got that in the eye or a small insect who was bathed in it.

These beetles are reported to be mainly carnivorous. Could they also use their scalding hose to hunt?

These Bombardier Beetles were mainly found amongst the drier rocks above water level. Their bright coloration makes them hard to miss and easy to remember, in the same way that Monarch butterflies don’t try to be inconspicuous.

Another showy ground beetle of the North Peters Kill banks is, to use its scientific name, Chlaenius sericeus. This is a large, startlingly green beetle covered in a fine fuzz. It is reportedly another predator on the prowl. While these beetles don’t possess the Bombardier’s chemical canon, they are not short on odor – for most of the rest of the afternoon after picking one of these up while taking these photographs, my fingers smelt of rancid butter. This is a hairy genus of ground beetle, literally. Most ground beetles are relatively smooth-surfaced. A few upland species are fuzzy, and this tends to accumulate the dust of their surroundings, seemingly providing effective camouflage. But these are wetland creatures, not apt to get dust covered, so what might be the utility of the pelage?

To suggest an answer to that, I need to talk about photography. I sometimes take the ‘desert island’ approach to photographing live ground beetles. Ground beetles are fast. Often, if you just put one down on the ground, it’s gone before you can snap a picture. So, I put them on a rock surrounded by water and, while they try to figure out their predicament, I take some photos before usually releasing them somewhere back on dry land. For many ground beetles that approach works but, as it turns out, not for Chlaenius. Those beetles either crawl down the side of the rock and voluntarily fully submerge themselves or they take off in a skating/swimming motion across the water. In either case, those hairs could help. By trapping air, they could make the ground beetle more buoyant, facilitating swimming. Alternatively, if they can pull themselves underwater, that trapped air could serve as a diving bell of sorts, providing them with an air reserve.

This is a cool beetle who really deserves a good common name, any suggestions?

This Chlaenius sericeus was found along the same, rocky North Peters Kill beach. These are large (ca. 1/2″), beautifully colored ground beetles.
When confined to its ‘desert island’, this same beetle scuttered away across the water, perhaps aided by air trapped on its fuzzy body (it’s underside is also fuzzy).
This is an earlier photo of a related species taken elsewhere. On at least a couple of instances, I have seen rock-bound Chlaenius such as this one purposefully clamber over the edge and down into the water. This photo shows the silvery air bubble trapped in the beetle’s fuzz.

To add to this exotic fauna, we have the pill-shaped Omophron americanus. A ground beetle so oddly shaped that it is hard to believe it’s even a ground beetle. These are beetles of gravelly or sandy stream banks. It has been suggested that their round shape helps them quickly bury themselves in loose sand. One often finds them by pouring water on such beaches and then waiting to see who pops out of the ground for air (it is an understandable general behaviour of stream-side ground beetles that when water arrives, they head for higher ground). As their impressive mandibles suggest, they are predatory.

This North Peters Kill Omophron kindly waited around for photographs.

Most of the above-mentioned ground beetles are found primarily along waterways or around water bodies. Only rarely do we find them in farm fields. But Patrobus longicornis is an exception. This polished, black ground beetle is supported by spindly, light-colored legs that make it a spritely runner. I didn’t actually find this species in my short visit to the North Peters Kill, but have seen it along many other regional creeks. However, we also regularly find it in and around farm fields. It’s an omnivore and could, conceivably, be consuming weed seeds. One of our current projects is exploring the diets of on-farm ground beetles to see if we can better describe their potential agronomic role.

However, to end back at the beginning, it’s sometimes nice to forget about utility and just spend some time appreciating the ‘exotic’ in our own backyards.

A Patrobus longicornis photographed elsewhere. This is a relatively common beetle of both stream banks and farm fields.

Posted on in farms, insects, plants, Uncategorized

12 July 2024: Insects of Rose Hill

by Conrad (with some photos and field assistance from Laura & Meg).

First of all, I’m not trying to ‘back date my check’ by associating this with a date of 9 days ago – that is when we visited Rose Hill, not the date on which this was written. Because phenology changes rapidly, it seems important to use the date we were actually on the ground.

In 1936, on the current land of Rose Hill Farm only the northwest corner appeared to be in orchard.

Today, orchards of various sorts fill much of Rose Hill. Surprisingly, one of the areas reverting to forest is that northwest area which appeared to be orchard in the earlier image. The pink line refers to our approximate path, and yellow-boxed numbers indicated the approximate locations of some of the below landscape shots.

Several ponds are scattered across Rose Hill. This photograph was taken looking southwest from roughly point 1 on the above map. All ponds probably had predatory fish, possibly reducing their ecological value for some dragonflies.

One of the ecologically most interesting areas was the wet meadow shown in this photo, taken looking west-northwest along the fence from near point 2. There is wetland beyond the fence here and that wetland has snuck into Rose Hill.

Among the fun plants spotted in this area were Yellow Star Grass (a somewhat unusual plant found in both wetlands and dry forests) and…

Square-stemmed Monkey Flower, a moist-meadow plant.

Some of the strips between trees had been left unmowed, leaving a welcome abundance of clover. This picture was taken near point 2, looking north.

Mowing had occurred between the rows of some smaller trees, although taller vegetation, including Common Milkweed and Indian Hemp, was growing up within rows but between the trees. This photo was taken looking northeast from around point 3.

There were also larger patches of uncut vegetation, including this dry hillock north of point 4 and capped by sumach and knapweed.

This moister, unmowed block was located roughly north of point 5. Flowers included Queen Anne’s Lace (aka Wild Carrot) and Common Milkweed. The Rose Hill bioblock, where they are experimenting with organic production, is located just beyond this meadow, but we did not enter because it had recently been sprayed with organic pesticides.

This photo was taken looking north from point 6; a pond is hidden behind the bushes and surrounded by this wetter meadow.

We split up and circled around these ponds before rejoining for a quick lunch near the main parking lot and heading out for a final loop through the northwest section of the Farm.

We’ll begin our ‘insect hodge-podge’ section with this species, the elegant, iridescent Dogbane Beetle, which we found hanging out in the Indian Hemp (a species of Dogbane).

Lacewings are described as beneficials, largely because of their predatory larvae. One can even buy them commercially. However, we see their adults and larvae so rarely that it’s hard to believe that, in our region at least, they are usually having much of a demographic impact on pests. If you have observed otherwise, please let us know!

Crops aren’t the only plants afflicted by aphids – here Common Milkweed flowers appear to sag under their aphid load.

Honey Bees were the most common bee we observed (not surprising, given the on-farm bee hives), however we did observe some other bees including this Brown-belted Bumble Bee (Bombus griseocollis) and this…

This is a Giant (or “Sculptured”) Resin Bee. I was rather baffled by this bee, and do not recall having seen it before. This is an Asian bee that was apparently accidentally introduced to the US in the early 1990s; it now occurs throughout most of the East Coast. It is solitary and makes its solo nests in wood cavities. It apparently doesn’t make its own excavations, and so sometimes uses the holes pre-drilled by our native carpenter bees.

Dragonfly and damselfly diversity was not particularly high, perhaps because of the presence of fish. Among the species we noted were the following:

The common, widespread Widow Skimmer; this mature male shows the characteristic black wing bases fringed with white frosting.

This bright green beast is a female Eastern Pondhawk; she’s really our only dragonfly with such a vibrant green coloration.

The maturing blue male of the Eastern Pondhawk, both sexes have that white tail tip.

Sorry for the ‘headless’ photograph, but at least this image shows the distinctive orange wings of the male Eastern Amberwing.

It appears that this female Eastern Amberwing may have flown too close to the clay sprayer. In organic orcharding, a clay compound is used to coat fruit with a protective clay layer.

The colorful Halloween Pennant is common in our fields at this time of year.

For longer than I should have, I mistook this for the preceding species because of its similar size, behaviour,and orange-yellow coloration. However, note the different patterning of the dark dots on the wings. This is a Calico Pennant, whose females and young males look like this. Mature males are…

a distinct red (but don’t mistake them for Meadowhawks!).

Damselflies, such as this bluet, tend to be smaller and thinner.

One of the key characteristics for identifying these insects is the shape of the so-called claspers – the structures that the males use to grasp the females behind the head. Because that physical pairing is a integral part of the mate bonding, clasper structure tends to be unique, perhaps creating something like a lock-and-key with the architecture of the female. The shape of these claspers (together with features of its coloration) suggest that this is a Familiar Bluet. As the name suggests, this is a common species; it found throughout almost the entire continental US.

The purplish hue of this damselfly earmark it as a Variable Dancer. This another relatively common species, with the core of its distribution in the eastern US.

Turning to the butterflies, we were welcomed to the parking lot by a Giant Swallowtail. As the name implies, this is our largest swallowtail species. Unique among our species, it appears to be yellow with black markings below and black with yellow markings above. This is a southern species that occasionally comes north in greater or lesser numbers. This years seems to be a relatively good one for it, as we have noted it at various locations. Its only regional caterpillar foodplant (outside of some garden exotics) is probably Northern Prickly Ash, a sparsely distributed species in our region.

A Viceroy hanging out on Indian Hemp, as documented below…

its look-alike, the Monarch, was also present. It was once thought that the palatable Viceroy mimicked the distasteful Monarch. It is now believed that both are distasteful and so reinforce each other’s warning coloration. Here, a Monarch visits milkweed in the wet meadow of the southwest corner. Also present in this photo is..

what appears to be a Great Spangled Fritillary. Last year was a banner year for this species, they seem noticeably less abundant this year. Because their caterpillars eat violets, they tend to be associated with forest edges. Although we didn’t get a good photograph of it, we also saw one individual of the Great Spangled’s smaller cousin, the Meadow Fritillary.

This sharply marked little skipper was found relatively near that same wet meadow. This is a Mulberry Wing (so named because some fresh individuals have a distinctly purplish hue). Its caterpillars feed on sedges and we generally associate it with well-developed, older wetlands, and we consider it somewhat unusual.

Dun Skippers were more common. This individual has an atypical white wing marking on one side, perhaps associated with some developmental quirk or a post-metamorphosis run-in. Its caterpillars are also sedge feeders, but it doesn’t seem to be a tightly associated with wetlands.

To finish with the skippers, this large species was relatively common both here and at other farms – which butterfly is it?

At first glance, one might think that both of these are Black Swallowtails, but actually only the top photograph is that species. The bottom is a Spicebush Swallowtail (so identified by the one missing orange spot along the inner row of orange spots on the underside of the hind wing); as the name implies, its caterpillars feed on Spicebush, a shrub of wet areas.

Common Ringlet, a butterfly that should already be familiar if you have read previous blogs; it is regularly found bouncing across old fields at this time of year.

Two more welcome ‘regulars’ during this time of year, a Common Woodnymph (lower left) and Pearl Crescent (upper right).

Eastern Tailed-blues tend to be most common (or at least visible!) in short, grassy areas. Sooty grey means this is a female.

This beauty is a good butterfly shot to end with – our only truly green regional butterfly, the Juniper Hairstreak, is widespread but sparsely distributed in our area. Its caterpillars feed on Red Cedar (actually a juniper), and it is usually found near stands of that tree. Its presence at Rose Hill surprised us because we hadn’t come across many Red Cedar on the farm. However, Kevin assured us they are nearby. Some orchardists aren’t fond of Red Cedar, because it is the alternate host of Apple-Cedar Rust.

As listed above, we saw about 21 butterfly species at Rose Hill, the core group of widespread openland butterflies was spiced by a few species associated with damper areas (indicated in blue hues above). While some of these (fainter blue) seem to range more widely, Mulberry Wing and Spicebush Swallowtail (brighter blue) have tighter wetland associations. Also augmenting the diversity were a couple of species that, while not rare, we only see occasionally: Juniper Hairstreak and Giant Swallowtail. The ample flowers left along edges, around ponds, and in ‘roughs’ retained within the orchards helped attract and support this diversity.

As noted, the dragonfly community was primarily composed of relatively common (nothing wrong with that!) pond dragonflies and damselflies.

Three Familiar Bluets have a tête-à-tête.

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21 June 2024: Visit to Rose Hill Orchard, Treadlight Farm, Hudson Valley Seed Co., and Transgenerational Farms.

posted by Conrad.

A day of preliminary farm visits to a quartet of collaborating farms: Rose Hill Orchard (Red Hook, NY), Treadlight Farm (Kerhonkson, NY), Hudson Valley Seed Company (Accord, NY) and Transgenerational Farm (Accord, NY).

Rose Hill is a pick-your-own orchard and cidery with 190 apple varieties, plus peaches, plums, blueberries, and cherries. They are a low-spray operation and have one ‘bioblock”, where they are trying organic methods. We (Claudia, Josie Laing & Conrad) walked around with farm manager Kevin Clark.

orchard with taller herbaceous aeras
Rose Hill: Trees, mowed strips and areas herbaceous areas where plants like Common Milkweed go to flower.

One of the most noticeable aspects, to an ecologist, is the space provided for wild (literally) flowers.  This takes the form of both blocks allowed to grow up until a fall mowing and similarly managed areas between the trees.

sumach clump
Rose Hill: A taller Staghorn Sumach reaches out of as sea of Smooth Sumach.

Fun sightings included Sassafras growing along the eastern edge, and a fruiting Serviceberry with ample, ripe, healthy fruits (elsewhere birds or Apple-cedar Rust generally seem to get to the berries before we do). There were also both Smooth Sumach and Staghorn Sumach. In the abundant flowering milkweed, we noted the occasional bee or beetle ‘captured’ by the Common Milkweed flowers, but also saw them feeding ample visitors including a Banded Hairstreak. We also saw Common Milkweed’s cousin, Indian Hemp, between the trees. Other butterflies noticed during our quick visit were Least Skipper, Tiger Swallowtail (probably Eastern), Meadow Fritillary (they have been declining and so are always nice to see), Common Wood Nymph, Monarch, Silver-spotted Skipper and Great Spangled Fritillary.

Rose Hill: Josie took this picture of a Banded Hairstreak nectaring on Common Milkweed growing up between apple trees. Its caterpillars reportedly feed on oaks, hickories, Black Walnut and Butternut.

This was just our preliminary tour of Rose Hill, so expect more details later. Our visits to the other three farms were only quick orientations from the farmer, and we did not spend time scouting any of them, so expect an introduction to each of them later also. Anne Bloomfield who, together with Will Yandik, will be doing bird surveys joined us for our visits to the ‘west bank’ farms.