Posted on November 7, 2025November 8, 2025 in Uncategorized

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

by Conrad.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 20^th 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

Posted on July 24, 2025 in Uncategorized

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.*

Posted on December 9, 2024December 10, 2024 in farms, insects, plants

6 Sept. 2024: Butterflies & Some Other Insects of The Hudson Valley Seed Company.

by Conrad.

*Looking northeast from around # 3 on the below aerial. We are standing within the main gardens on the site.*

The new facilities of the Hudson Valley Seed Company are located on Airport Road in Kerhonkson, Ulster County, NY. This business mixes seed production (including of native wild flowers) and artwork in order to encourage and facilitate gardeners.

*A 2022 image of the land of the Hudson Valley Seed Company, with numbered squares indicating the approximate locations from which the accompanying landscape shots were taken.*

The semi-open area through the woods about 600′ due south of the #1 is the wetland that Claudia profiled in her earlier plant posting. In that same post, Claudia also describes the botany of other parts of the property. The earlier posting on creekside beetles was based on observations made just a short way southwest of #1.

*A 1958 image of the same land. Portions of the forest in the southeast half of the property appear to still be growing in this era.*

*Looking northeast from #1 across what was, at the time of the photograph, a relatively freshly ploughed field.*

*Looking south-southeast into the clearing from #2.*

*Looking southwest from #3. The building in the center left is the new shop and processing facility* .

*OK, so it’s not an insect. A female Ruby-throated Hummingbird takes a nip at Klip Dagga (*Leonotis nepetifolia), a cultivated species in the mint family.

*Ooops, not an insect either. These are the ornate seed heads of Shinleaf (*Pyrola elliptica), a wild-growing plant found in a damp, wooded area just northeast of #2. I stumbled on it while looking for butterflies. The (blurry) dark green leaf with white veins hiding in the background also belongs to this species.

More plants, just an assortment of grasses. No, wait a second, there is an insect. Do you see it? It took me a while to figure out why I had taken this photograph. Coneheads, such as this appears to be, are among the singing insects of late-summer grasslands and edges.

*Another field singer was this female Short-winged Meadow Katydid. They reportedly have a relatively broad diet, eating not only plants but other insects such as aphids.*

The insects in this image are also not conspicuous, although video would have made them more apparent. Above the ploughed ground in front of the forest are clouds of small creatures whose dancing swarm was especially evident when seen in motion. *Here, they appear as a light brown dappling in front of the foliage.*

*Capturing one of these swarmers in a butterfly net, reveals a small fly, perhaps some sort of midge. The wavering clouds are thought to be part of their mating ritual.*

*While we’re on flies, here’s an introduced species of drone fly; it is thought to be a mimic of Honey Bees. We’ve already seen it in at least one previous post.*

*These fuzzy, long-legged flies are called bee flies.*

As adults, bee flies seem to be avid nectar feeders, and, while they do not appear to intentionally collect pollen, pollen does sometimes gather on their furry bodies. They are parasitoids, laying their eggs near those of a variety of insect hosts. The bee fly larvae hatch and proceed to eat their host’s larvae. At least some species reportedly have an interesting pattern of coating their eggs in sand and then aerial dropping them into or near the burrows of their hosts. The young of ground-nesting beetles, wasps and bees seem to be the most common prey of bee fly larvae.

*Speaking of parasitoids…. this Tobacco Hornworm (*Manduca sexta, *the caterpillar of a sphinx moth) was found near the tomatoes seen in the garden shown in the first photo.*

Tobacco Hornworms sometimes host a parasitoid wasp who, upon pupating, can cover a caterpillar with what looks like a coat of small rice grains. While none of those pupae are visible on this individual, the random dark points (not the ones along the white lines nor the bullseye spiracles) on its skin may be the work of a wasp. The closely related Tomato Hornworm (*Manduca quinquemaculata*) also occurs in our area and both species eat tobacco and tomato; both are also affected by parasitoids.

What appears to be a Familiar Bluet (a type of damselfly) was hanging out on this a poking through ground cloth. As shown by the bottom photo, moderately certain ID required live-capturing one for a closer look.

*Twelve-spotted Skimmers and some other dragonflies patrolled overhead. Why?*

Such a cluster of dragonflies and damselflies would make sense were there swarms of their insect prey in the air but, so far as I could tell, such prey were not particularly abundant. Watching further, I saw some dragonflies periodically dive down as if trying to touch the ground cloth with the tips of their abdomens. This behaviour is similar to what females do when depositing their eggs in water, and I am guessing that these insects were actually mistaking the smooth, reflective ground cloth for open water. Have any of you ever noticed something like this on your own farms? If so, I would be curious to hear about it.

Turning finally to butterflies, I believe this is a Northern Broken Dash skipper, one of the three, hard-to-identify ‘witches’. It gets its name from the pattern formed by a dark band of pheromone-producing cells on the wings of the male. This, however, is a female. The caterpillars feed on an array of grasses. It is neither a particularly rare nor common species.

*Meadow Fritillaries are trim, middling-sized butterflies, who seem to be rarer than they ought to be given the prevalence of the violets that their caterpillars eat.*

In general, probably because of the lateness of the season, butterflies were not particularly diverse during my visit. The rarest butterfly spotted was one of the so-called Emperors (either a Hackberry or Tawny Emperor); unfortunately for this post, it flew away before I could get a photo.

This is the last butterfly post of the season, and you should now be well-versed in our common butterflies. So, as your final exam, here are five relatively common butterflies photographed at the Hudson Valley Seed Company…

*1) Who is this butterfly and, for extra points, is it male or female?*

*2) And what about this one? And, again, extra points for male or female.*

*3) And whose is this northern interloper?*

*4) And this one (whose females are sometimes white and sometimes not)?*

*5) This one gets its name from the lighter colored patch visible in the darker, underside field along the hind edge of the rear wing as seen in the right butterfly. Who is it?*

How many did you get?

The Answers

Posted on September 18, 2024 in farms, insects, Uncategorized

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 July 23, 2024 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.

Posted on July 14, 2024 in farms, insects

11 July 2024: Blue Star Farm & Surroundings.

by Conrad.

As this LiDAR image shows, the western portion of Blue Star Farm, run by Sue Decker, is located in Stuyvesant NY on terrace land above the Hudson River (seen on the left). A seasonal waterway drains north out of this farm, joining up with Mill Creek shortly before entering the Hudson. Sue’s “home farm” is slightly farther east along route 26A.

We parked just southwest of the “1” on the map and then headed north along veggie and cover crop beds, before cutting northeast to the new pond (near “2”) and then following the forest edge south, before cutting west through veggie plots to flower beds of Damsel Garden, run by land owner Denise Pizzini. We then moved south before turning east along the pastures, and finally bearing north into a finger of wettish meadow. The forested sections in the center of the land are wetland, sporting some interesting trees that Claudia will describe in a subsequent plant post.

In the 1940s, much of the now-forested area was cleared, although a patch of mature swamp forest existed near the center of the parcel. As was typical of this era, orchards were extensive, although they only nudged into the edges of the current farmland

This photograph looks north from near the point marked “1” on the earlier image.

This photograph was taken from near point “2” and looks south, across a pond constructed around 2022. This was a dragonfly hot bed, as we’ll see later.

This picture, taken looking south from a bit north of point “3”, shows the welcoming (at least to insects!) soft edge with the forest.

This photograph was taken around point “3” and looks southwest across Blue Star veggie beds towards the buildings and beds of Damsel Gardens.

This wet meadow was photographed looking north from around point “4”. The mature swamp forest mentioned earlier is on the right.

One characteristic of this farm is its sandy soils, as evidenced here. These are remnants of Glacial Lake Albany beaches (or shallow, submerged sand flats). Making a cameo is one of the numerous grasshoppers we encountered. Most of the time they flushed hurriedly from in front of us, their large wings sometimes fooling us into mistaking them for short-flighted butterflies.

One consequence of the sandy soils seems to be ample habitat for native, ground-nesting bees, such as this Eastern Miner Bee (or close relative).

This graph illustrates data we collected from 19 Columbia County farms back in 2010. In and around tomato beds, we indexed flower abundance (much of which was unplanted “weeds”) and surveyed bees using bowl traps. This graphic shows that, relative to all other farms and especially for those with such low flower abundance, bees were very abundant at the current Blue Star site. Our guess was that this was because the sandy soil made excellent habitat for ground nesting bees. Bee diversity also appeared to be relatively high, ranking fourth in a quick and dirty assessment of diversity. We did not assess flower abundance during our current visit and it may well now be higher.

This native bee may be another species of mining bee.

Many bumble bees are also ground nesters.

The most common bee species observed was the Honey Bee, likely originating from…

these hives along the forest edge. While many of us appreciate the honey, and Honey Bees can definitely be a boon to crop pollination, there is evidence that, at least under certain conditions, they can out compete native bees, thereby reducing the habitat quality for some species. Where native bees are abundant, additional pollinators are usually not needed.

Open sand or clay patches are also favored by tiger beetles. This happens to be a “Punctured Tiger Beetle”, named for the row of point-like indentations along its back.

Speaking of beetles, this is a Green June Beetle, an elegant beetle with a wide-ranging diet, who is sometimes considered a minor agricultural pest.

Most of our attention was focused on dragonflies (& damselflies) and butterflies. We’ll start with the former.

This large dragonfly was seen flying over the aforementioned pond. While the green body and reddish tail could suggest a female Common Green Darner (a species that was also present), the brightness of the red, coupled with an evident white patch below the hind wings (not so evident in this photo, but clearer in others), suggests Comet Darner. Comet Darners are the biggest dragonflies regionally, and they are generally considered rare. We know them from only two other sites in the County.

The vegetation around the pond edge sported numerous darner exuvia – the hollow, dry skins left behind when the aquatic nymph clambers out of the water, unzips its diving suit, and flies away. These appear to be exuvia of the Common Green Darner.

Widow Skimmers are common pond dragonflies that range widely in search of prey.

The Eastern Pond Hawk is another relatively common pond dragonfly. This bright green individual is the female, who has a much more verdant coloration than…

the blueish male shown above. One wonders if she is also more apt to hang out in green vegetation. As the traces of green suggest, the coloration of younger males resembles that of the female in many dragonfly species .

The name “Common Whitetail” almost says it all, but only the males have such white abdomens.

This slightly tattered Blue Dasher female also seems to carry its habitat’s design onto its thorax.

The Blue Dasher male tends to have a blue tail with a black tip.

OK, I admit this is an odd angle. It shows a pair of flying Black Saddlebags from the back. The male is in front and is clasping the female behind the head with his aptly named “claspers”. Unlike Widow Skimmers, Pondhawks, and Blue Dashers, Black Saddlebags rarely perch. Rather than ‘hawking’ after prey from stationary resting points, this species does most of its hunting on the wing. This mated pair is probably not hunting, but rather looking for a place where their eggs can be deposited.

A mature male of one of our red-colored Meadowhawks. We have a trio of similar species and, not having tried to catch and inspect this individual more closely, I won’t guess at a species name.

Damselflies are close relatives of the dragonflies, but are generally smaller, slimmer and hold their wings above their backs when perched. This damselfly is an Eastern Forktail, a common if somewhat inconspicuous species.

A Familiar Bluet. The defining characteristic for many damselflies and dragonflies is often those male claspers mentioned earlier; they are found at the very tip of the tail. Probably because they are an important component of the pairing process, their shape tends to be species-specific.

Damselflies can have exuvia too!

Moving on to butterflies, this is the iconic Monarch. We have seen a scattering of them so far this year.

This is the Viceroy, a Monarch look-alike. It is usually smaller than a Monarch and has that distinctive black line paralleling the trailing edge of the hindwing.

Cabbage Whites were abundant at the farm. As hinted at here, their caterpillars (aka cabbageworms) feed on brassicas and can sometimes be crop pests. Cabbage White are not native, and were first noticed around the ports of Quebec City and New York in the 1860s, probably having hitched a ride on imported cabbages.

Their medium size and bright white wings is almost distinctive. Just to keep things interesting however…

some female sulphur butterflies are white, and so a definitive ID can require a close look. When their wings are closed, sulphurs have a small, brown-outlined eye on their hindwings; Cabbage Whites have no such mark. The tops of the wings are also distinctive but are less commonly seen.

“Skippers” are moth-like butterflies with comparatively large bodies. Their flight is usually hurried, with minimal apparent gliding. This is our largest skipper, the Silver-spotted Skipper. It is a common resident on farms, where its caterpillars feed on various, usually non-commercial legumes.

Butterflies do age. Their wings do not grow back and they progressively lose their scales, hence the tattered, almost translucent wings of this Silver-spotted Skipper.

Another Silver-spotted Skipper, this time in the relatively rare open-wing posture.

We have a host of tiny skippers that often go relatively unnoticed. They can be tricky to ID, so much so that butterfly aficionados call this and two other darkish skipper species the “Three Witches”. This is a male Little Glassywing, or at least so I have convinced myself!

My guess is that this is a female of the same species. These smaller skippers often perch with their wings in a ‘jet-fighter’ position – the hindwing flat and the forewing at an angle.

I believe this slightly drabber-colored species is a Dun Skipper, another one of the witches. Unlike the other two witches, the Dun is a sedge feeder; correspondingly, it tends to be most common around wetter areas.

The bronzy head of this fresh individual is a subtle but useful characteristic for recognizing the Dun Skipper.

Some skipper do, however, perch with their wings flat. In fact, one rarely sees these particular species with their wings closed. This is a Wild Indigo Duskywing, a native butterfly whose caterpillars feed on Wild Indigo. This would currently seem to be a losing strategy in our region – how many times have you seen Wild Indigo? However, species aren’t stupid evolutionarily, and the Wild Indigo Duskwing could now be more aptly named the Vetch Duskywing, having accepted introduced vetches into its diet.

This was the first time I have seen a Common Checkered Skipper for at least a couple of years. We are on the northern edge of this southerly species’ range, and they have not been common locally. It may not overwinter with us and might need to recolonize each summer from farther south. Its caterpillars feed on Velvet Leaf, a farm weed that Sue assured us she has plenty of.

This little beauty is a Pearl Crescent – a small, sometimes common butterfly whose caterpillars feed on asters. They were most common in the flowers between the pond and the forest, but were found throughout the farm.

A mated pair of Pearl Crescents, the larger, more darkly marked female has her wings open.

Crescent taxonomy harbors some confusion. There are probably at least two Crescent species in the County, the widespread Pearl Crescent and the less common Northern Crescent. The distinguishing characteristic is said to be the lack of black dividing lines in the central, orange field of the Northern’s hindwing. So perhaps this is a Northern Crescent, or maybe it’s just a particularly ‘blond’ Pearl Crescent.

Only slightly bigger than a large, female Pearl Crescent, the Meadow Fritillary seems to be declining regionally for reasons unknown. In the 19th century, for example, its range extended throughout Massachusetts, but now it is mainly found in the western part of the State. It has similarly retracted from the surroundings of NYC. One hopes it will not go the way of the Regal Fritillary – a once relatively widely distributed species, now nearly extinct on the East Coast.

The Meadow Frit’s underwing is well camouflaged.

The underwing of this butterfly is also subtle, but, wait a bit and…

the Red Admiral may flash its more dramatic wing tops. Like the Monarch (and a few other of our species), the Red Admiral is migratory.

Do you see the butterfly hiding in this picture?

What about now? This is an Eastern Comma. It is thought that such contrasting coloration of the two sides of the wings might play a role in a startle strategy – come too close and a potential predator gets a surprising flash of orange as its intended prey flies away. Alternatively, perhaps the coloration plays a role in inter-species communication but is best kept under wraps much of the time.

As suggested by the fact we have already seen this hairstreak in our Little Seed Gardens posting, the Grey Hairstreak is probably are most common hairstreak.

A sooty Eastern Tailed-blue female.

Common Ringlets flash their brick orange while flying. Somewhat counterintuitively, this is a northern species which has come south over the past 30 years or so.

This reclusive butterfly was found hugging the edge of the swamp forest. The Appalachian Brown is largely confined to wetlands, where its caterpillars’ food plants – sedges – are found. Unlike some other wetland butterflies, one rarely sees it on field flowers, perhaps because tree sap and animal dung are its more favored adult foods.

A male Black Swallowtail decked with ample ‘scrambled eggs’.

The female has less yellow. This is a native butterfly, but is sometimes considered an agricultural pest on carrots, dill, parsley and other cultivated relatives. Caterpillars also feed on Queen Anne’s Lace.

Butterflies aren’t the only ‘Lepidoptera’ out during the day – several of our moths are also day fliers. These Yellow-collared Scape Moths seem especially common this year. Their caterpillars are reportedly grass and sedge feeders, but the adults seem to love nectaring on a range of flowers.

None of the butterflies we saw at this farm were particularly rare, but their abundance and diversity (18 species) were encouraging. This was probably due in part to the diversity of habitats on the farm, from wet meadow to swamp forest to pasture to pond edge, combined with the ecological farming practices used and the ample space for wild-growing flowers.

The dragonflies and damselflies around the new pond were fairly abundant, especially for a pond that is only a couple of year old. One of the key factors that encourages the diversity of these insects is a lack of fish, and we would discourage their introduction. If it does not completely dry out, there might be additional species of dragonflies in the swamp forest, but we did not venture in during this visit.

Stay tuned for Claudia’s plant contribution.