It can be useful to periodically restate what it is we’re trying to do. The following are a few words that were shared at the 17 Dec. 2025 meeting of the Research Circle. In part, they’re meant to help newcomers understand what we’re up to and to answers some questions we have received.
The Research Circle is not the project of any one person or organization. While we are fortunate to get funding from the Farm Hub and the Circle includes staff from Hawthorne Valley, it really derives from a shared desire to work together on topics of mutual interest. Some of us have been at this (on-farm ecological research, farming) for a while, and we are searching for ways to build a community of like-minded individuals to design, execute and act upon ecological research of the community’s own design.
That means that the Circle has no other existence than all of you, all of us. It exists for as long as we want it to and in the shape we choose for it. It is very much a work in progress. Some of us have tried to establish an initial framework in order to get it off the ground but this is intended as a starting point, not an end point.
Reflecting on our own strengths and weaknesses, we as the ecologist did establish one set of boundaries on our own work: There are many, many relevant research questions around farming. We cannot hope to answer them all, nor do we have the capacity to do so. While, to a certain degree, we can bring in the expertise of others, for now what we can offer as researchers is a focus on the role of on-farm habitats in supporting nature for its own sake and for its interaction with production.
In this context, the reports presented in the Fall are the research feedback from projects we all designed together the previous Spring and that were carried out during the growing season. The hope is that, over the course of the Winter, we can all consider these results and what they might mean for management and continued research. These are your results, please ask questions, be (constructively) critical – groan loudly, whoop audibly, share thoughts!
The Intentional and the Accidental: The Role of Cultivated and Uncultivated Flowers in Supporting Plant Diversity and Insect Abundance on Farms.
One project whose results we shared on 17 Dec involved studying the support that on-farm flowers provide to pollinators and other flower visitors. How big a contribution to plant biodiversity is provided by the uncultivated (aka “weedy”) flowers found in fallows, lawns, edges and wilder areas relative to flowers seeded for cut flowers, vegetable crops, or intentional pollinator habitat? What role do these same flower play in supporting flower visitors?
We plan a data-rich blog or two exploring these data in more detail. In the meantime, in this talkand these slides, Claudia and Conrad provide a preliminary description of the distribution of such flowers across the seasons and the farms, and summarize how popular the different flowers were with an array of flower visitors. (These links are also available from the Resources page.)
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 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 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.
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.
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?A ground-cloth pond?
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?
Zinnias in a bed at Treadlight Farm, Kerhonkson, NY.Treadlight leases land from Arrowhead Farm. The yellow outline is not a property line – it is the deer-fenced, ca. 33.4 acre plot of land that contains Treadlight’s leased production fields, together with those of Long Season Farm. Numbers refer to the approximate locations of the landscape photographs below.These fields, located in the floodplain of Roundout Creek, have long been in production.Looking east-northeast from point #1, along some of Treadlight’s flower beds.Looking south-southwest from ca. point #1, across the fallow land at the west end of the fenced in parcel.Looking south from point #2 across some of Treadlight’s flower beds and, in the distance, some Long Season fields.Looking ca. east-northeast from near point #2, across the flower beds (whose posts are propping up a couple of King birds) towards fallow beyond that.This photo, taken from a point near the greenhouses, and looking west along the north fence, shows the lush edges found along the fencelines.
Treadlight Farm is an organic flower producer with a partial focus on raising native wildflowers for seed and retail. Its beds are located on leased land in the floodplain of the Roundout Creek. When I visited on 5 August, some beds were winding down. Most of the land is occupied by tilled flower and vegetable fields, the latter being worked by Long Season Farm; greenhouses are also present near the center of the area. The east and west tips of the parcel are fallow (or perhaps better, ‘old-field’) areas that appear to have been mowed occasionally.
The butterflies included many of the usual cast of characters you should have come to expect if you have been reading these blogs. This shaded Cabbage White is hanging out on Purple Loosestrife, in the fallows at the very western end of the parcel.
Cabbage Whites (a European species that took hold here in the 1860s) and the Clouded Sulphur (a native) were two of the most common farm-field butterflies in our surveys, together they accounted for roughly 44% of the ca. 1500 butterflies we noted across all nine participating farms. At Treadlight, they accounted for slightly less – around 36% of the butterflies we spotted.There are actually two species of butterflies in this shot, do you see them? The most obvious is a handsome Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. For open areas, we classify this species as, ecologically, a “Visitor”. Its caterpillars feed on a range of woody plants including cherries and ashes. However, it seems to happily visit field flowers to drink nectar. A Clouded Sulphur is flitting behind it. I have several pictures of this Sulphur ‘buzzing’ this Swallowtail. Maybe it wanted to share the flower?Monarchs were also present and nectaring at various flowers, including these Zinnias.
Treadlight accounted for about a quarter of all the Monarch sightings during our surveys. However, they were notably less common this year than during some past years – on 10 Sept. of 2021, on the same type of flower and on the very same farm, we had over 130 Monarch sightings in 30 minutes; our tally this year, during roughly four hours, was a relatively meager 16. Assuming Zinnia = Zinnia (not necessarily true), a variety of factors including migration patterns, weather, and fluctuations in the regional abundance of Monarchs might explain this. The Monarch look-alike, a Viceroy.
Viceroys are slightly smaller than most Monarchs, and their caterpillars feed on woody plants, such as Cottonwood. This individual is playing hard to ID – one key character to distinguish the two species is a black line which extends through the Viceroy’s hind wing parallel to the outer margin and about half way from the wing edge to the wing base. This is clear in the inset photo showing a rather battered Viceroy, photographed by our program at the Farm Hub. The subject of our main photo only has a faint suggestion of this line.In contrast, Variegated Fritillaries seemed to be having a banner year – after having gone through various years without seeing them, we found them on three different farms. This is one of the several southern butterfly species who wandered north this year.This American Lady looks like it may have had a brush with a bird.
The large eyespots on the hindwing (one of which is now missing on this individual) may lead some birds to make a quick grab at the ‘wrong’ (for the bird) end. The lucky butterfly then lives to nectar another day. American Ladies are, like Monarchs, migratory. They don’t usually survive our Winters, but regularly recolonize during Summer, with late season individuals heading back south. Some of the other interlopers, perhaps including the Variegated Fritillary, have no such return trip – they’re constantly knocking on our door ecologically but, at least so far, most of the new populations that establish here during Summer then perish during the Winter. This might change if climate warming continues.Pearl Crescents were found on all nine farms this year, Treadlight was no exception. Here, one nectars at a mountain mint.Common Ringlet is, indeed, relatively common; it was also found on two thirds of the farms visited this year. This one is also nectaring at a mountain mint. Unlike the southern butterfly species pushing north, this is a northern species who, over the last three decades or so, has come south. Prior to about 1970, in the Northeast, they were not known south of Canada. They moved south because … uhhmm…. err…. ? (There’s A LOT we don’t know about butterflies!)OK, here’s the quiz butterfly for this posting. This large skipper, whose caterpillars are legume feeders, was found on two thirds of the farms we surveyed this year. Who is it?Getting into the skipper motif, this is a Common Sootywing, another one of those slightly more southerly species who seemed to have a good year regionally. The bright white spots on the deep velvety black background make me think of stars on a dark night.
Common Sootywing, while native itself, now uses non-native ‘weeds’ as caterpillar host plants (esp., Lamb’s Quarters). As Cech & Tudor note in their Butterflies of the East Coast (still my all-around favorite East Coast butterfly book), this diet switch has allowed this little butterfly to range much more widely than it may have done prior to European colonization. While we tend to think of native organisms as helpless victims of human encroachment, it is also important to remember they are not passive actors. Genetically and behaviourally, some butterflies and other organisms (including birds, as Will has pointed out) can adapt and exploit the changes around them. Of course, some sadly cannot make the change and gradually disappear.Treadlight was a relatively skippery place. One of our most common ‘grass skippers’ (a group of small skippers whose caterpillars feed on grasses) is usually the Peck’s Skipper, however we noted it on only a pair of farms this year. This hapless Peck’s Skipper has actually fallen prey to an Ambush Bug, whose head is just visible near that of the butterfly.Ambush Bugs have confusing speckling and an odd shape, both of which probably help them avoid detection as they lay in wait in the heads of flowers, like this Joe-Pye Weed. Note those muscular forearms that let them grab the prey that they then subdue with a quick injection of poison.Here, in more uplifting circumstances, two Peck’s Skippers assess each other, perhaps as a prelude to mating.A Least Skipper arriving to Viper’s Bugloss on the wing.A Broadwinged Skipper inspects yet more Joe-Pye Weed (are you getting an idea of what one of the favorite flowers ‘in town’ was?). Broadwinged Skippers have probably benefited from the spread of a non-native variety of one of their favorite caterpillar host plants – Phragmites.A subtle Tawny-edged Skipper surveys the scene while a pair of bumble bees have a tête-à-tête. Treadlight was the only farm where we noted this species. My sense with this skipper is that it’s rarely common, but in some years it appears to be more widespread than in others. 2024 did not seem to be a particularly propitious year for it.This is the aptly named Fiery Skipper. This is another species who is wending its way north. During our surveys, we only saw it at Treadlight, although a colleague also spotted one at the Farm Hub this year.
The abundance of skippers provokes some management thoughts – two of the important habitat ingredients for butterflies are the flowers that the adults nectar at and the host plants that their herbivorous larvae (aka caterpillars) consume. Monarchs, for example, will nectar at a variety of different flowers, including the Zinnia pictured earlier, but their caterpillars specifically need milkweeds. Similarly, many of the skippers pictured above are grass feeders. Although not all of those skippers are confined to native grasses, there are a few native-grass specialists whom we have seen in the region and who might be tempted to visit were their caterpillar host plants available. Given the abundant flower resources that Treadlight provides, it might be fun to think about what additional caterpillar foods could be seeded in the fallows at either end of the fenced-in area. Maybe a native grass seed mix could attract some interesting species.
This is where I usually wrap up my insect accounts of the farms, perhaps ending with shots of one or two other insects I encountered, such as this seemingly inquisitive blister beetle. However, Treadlight’s abundance of various flowers prompted me to spend some thought-provoking time observing the bees. I saw too few of this particular species, the Golden Northern Bumble Bee (Bombus fervidus) to discern its preferences. But this globally Vulnerable species is nice to see wherever one finds it!
What I found so intriguing was how different the bee faunas of various flower types could be. Rather than getting the sense that there was one chaotic community of bees who were all visiting everything in bloom, the pattern seemed to be more one of specialization – with certain flowers hosting particular bees largely not see elsewhere. It’s likely that a variety of factors explain these patterns, including the relationship between bee and flower morphology, and bee preferences for certain pollen and/or nectar biochemistries.An Eastern Bumble Bee (Bombus impatiens) on a Zinnia. This is currently one of our most commonly spotted bumble bees.A Honey Bee forages on a thistle flower while a smaller bee explores the unfocused foreground.The mountain mint in particular was bubbling with Honey Bees.A Honey Bee hive amidst the fallow.
Honey Bees and native bee conservation is a fraught interface. Prompted in part by concern about colony collapse disorder, many members of the public probably equate Honey Bee protection with bee conservation overall. However, as mentioned in a previous post, Honey Bees are not native to North American – they were originally imported to our area from eastern and southern Europe. Increasingly, researchers are warning about the impacts of Honey Bees on native bees (e.g., see this paper and this Xerces web page). This can come about by competition for resources (there’s only so much pollen and nectar out there!), direct interaction (‘hey, that’s my flower!’), and the spread of disease. Of course, there are reasons why Honey Bees are popular. Aside from the honey, they can be diligent, early-season crop pollinators. However, in many cases, where ample natural habitat is available, native bees (which include bumble bees) are as good as or better at the job of pollination. Honey Bees are here to stay and there are now numerous feral colonies living on their own in the wild, so, even were it desired (which I doubt it would be!), removing Honey Bees from the landscape would not be possible. However if native bee conservation is one of your goals on a particular property, then avoiding Honey Bee hives on that land might be appropriate.
While that might look like a large bumble bee joining Honey Bees on the mountain mint, it’s an Eastern Carpenter Bee, as indicated by the generally bare and shiny abdomen, together with tinted wings.This Ceratina is also considered to be a type of carpenter bee. However, unlike the Eastern Carpenter Bee (who, as many of us know, excavates its solitary nests in exposed wood), Ceratina excavates its nest holes in the soft pith of annuals, herbaceous perennials, and shrubs.A native green sweat bee (a male Agapostemon) visits Joe-Pye.A chunky, native Megachile bee, part of the group known as leaf cutters, shares a thistle with a small native bee. This Megachile is conspicuously gathering thistle pollen on the collecting hairs underneath its abdomen. Most of our female bees collect pollen on their legs. Pollen is used by mother bees to provision their young, so male bees generally lack pollen-collecting hairs. In solitary ground or cavity nesting bees like Megachile, the egg is deposited together with a pollen packet, which the larva then devours upon hatching.A female sweat bee loads up her hind legs with pollen. This tiny sweat bee (looks like a Lasioglossum species to me) demonstrates the source of its common name by looking for salts on my sweaty skin.
Anthidium manicatum at the flowers of a cultivated member of the mint family.
I only found this Anthidium bee in this one patch of flowers, where it was conspicuous. Not only were these bees relatively numerous, they were interacting ardently with each other, with bees boffing each other as they perched on flowers and occasionally coupling. Males are reportedly territorial, fending off newcomers except for the females they seek. Before one runs out and plants more of this flower in order to support native bees, it should be noted that, like the Honey Bee, this is not a native species, as its common name, the European Wool Carder Bee, reveals. The males reportedly use spines at the tip of their abdomens to attack and even kill other bees, and so are thought to sometimes prevent native bees from using certain flowers. There are, however, a couple of native Wool Carders, so be careful with your IDs. They are called “Wool Carders”, because they line their solitary nest cavities with a ‘woolly’ mat of plant hairs.
Appropriately enough given its perch, this is, according to a kindly helper on iNaturalist, Melissodes desponsa or the Eastern Thistle Longhorn Bee. Not surprisingly, it is said to prefer thistles.A bumble bee about to enter a tubular flower. This is surely what the flower, evolutionarily speaking, ‘wants’. The bee will enter the flower, encounter the anthers, intentionally or unintentionally pick up some pollen , and then depart to passively pollinate the next flower it visits. So far, so good.…But that long trip up a fuzzy tunnel can be inconvenient and slow; it’s probably not the most efficient way to gather nectar, if that’s all you’re after. What’s a wise bee to do? Cheat. This Honey Bee is feeding on nectar through some basal slits that it or an earlier bee made. These slits are clearly visible on the neighboring flower. I say ‘cheat’ because such slits let the bees take the nectar without encountering the pollen whose transport the flower was investing in.Even ants, like these Winter Ants, get in on the game.This is a bee, not a wasp.
Aside from the wasp-like coloration, the insect above is not particularly fuzzy, another waspish trait. Notice too that, as in wasps, there are no pollen-collecting hairs on the legs nor (although perhaps hard to see from this angle) on the underside of the abdomen. So, assuming this is a female bee, which is certainly possible, how is she collecting pollen?
Like our other bees, she does indeed feed pollen to her young, but it’s not pollen that she collects herself. Instead, she seeks out the nests of other solitary ground-nesting bees, most commonly those of the Eastern Squash Bee, a type of longhorn bee who is our primary squash pollinator. There she lays her egg, and, upon hatching, the new-born larva kills the host bee’s larva and feeds on the pollen hoard originally intended for the host’s young. If you’ve been following the story, then the common name, Squash Longhorn Cuckoo Bee, shouldn’t be completely surprising. (If the “cuckoo” part of the name confuses you, then look up how that bird raises its young.)
This sighting is a ‘two-fer’ – the Squash Longhorn Cuckoo Bee is only likely to be present if its host is too. It thus wouldn’t be surprising if, perhaps somewhere in a nearby cucurbit field of Long Season farm, Squash Bees were also active.Aside from butterflies, ground beetles are really ‘my thing’, but this one took an embarrassingly long time to ID, because I see this species so infrequently. I’m now pretty sure it’s Chaleanius tomentosus. This is not a species I know from Columbia County, although we have collected a couple of these beetles at the Farm Hub over the past decade.
Aside from being a nod to my entomological home-sweet-home, i.e., the ground beetles, I mention this beetle in order to bring up a small management tip. I found this beetle in the deeply sunken cavity around an irrigation spigot. Such cavities can serve as pit traps, not just for beetles but also potentially for small rodents and amphibians (think Heffalump traps in miniature). Once they have fallen in, exiting can be nearly impossible for small creatures. I don’t bring this up to ‘tsk tsk’ anybody, but rather because open holes are understandably a widespread type of occurrence on farms, when post holes go unfilled or other pits are left open. By capping the hole or simply putting in a few long sticks or stalks that rest on the cavity bottom and lean against the top lip, trapped creatures can be provided with an escape route. Elsewhere, I have even seen a similar thing occur, on a bigger scale, at abandoned silos, where a basal entry door was just high enough and the walls just smooth enough to capture passing Raccoons and other scavengers. As in the above example, a simple plank or log boardwalk could provide an easy way out.
A Hydrangea in full, if somewhat lonely, flower.
One of the most intriguing parts of doing this survey was, as I alluded to earlier, the wide variety of side-by-side flower options and so the opportunity to ask which insects liked which flowers. Scrolling through the preceding photos the variation in taste is evident – mountain mints, thistles, Zinnias, etc. But what you haven’t yet seen are the flowers to which bees were not coming. The Hydrangea above was an example – I saw little insect life on these blossoms. Why would a flower invest energy in creating showy flowers that don’t attract pollinators? Because we have asked it to. While some Hydrangea varieties are good pollinator plants, others have been bred in ways that mean pollinators are being attracted to an empty soda fountain. Breeding for beauty to the human eye can mean pollinators get short changed. This can seem like little more than an inconvenience for pollinators, but when showy flowers prompt passersby to stop for a look, then those aspiring pollinators are wasting precious energy that could be better devoted to visiting flowers that actually provide a reward and need the pollination.
If providing for pollinators is one goal of your garden, then next season think of spending some time noting which flowers are consistently attracting bees and butterflies who then actually settle to nectar or to assemble a pollen meal for their future young. Over time, you could encourage those busy buffets and perhaps think of editing out some of the less-appreciated flowers.
Two words of caution: first, before thinking of removing a flower, google its name and “pollinators” – some flowers are primarily pollinated by moths, whose visits likely go largely unseen; second, some flowers keep their petals well past their ‘sell-by date’, in other words, some flowers that were, when fresh, magnates for pollinators, lose their offerings later in the season while still looking appealing to our eye. Take it slow, watch, keep notes & don’t jump to conclusions, but see if any actionable patterns pop out.
An Ailanthus Webworm Moth shelters below a Honey Bee. Originally, this native species was probably confined to the Neotropics and some tropical host, but it has followed its adopted host, the non-native Tree of Heaven, northwards.
P.S. The quiz butterfly was a Silver-spotted Skipper.
Transgenerational Farm is a very small market garden on approximately three leased acres adjacent to the hop yard of Arrowwood Farm. It is surrounded on three sides by forest. We were able to only visit briefly (2 hours) on 30 August 2024, and it was an overcast morning—hardly the ideal conditions to see many insects.
The following aerial photo traces the approximate route taken for the plant surveys and letters indicate locations of the habitat photos we share below.
Aerial photo of Transgenerational Farm with the approximate route taken for the botany survey in sky blue; capital letters reference locations from which the following habitat photos were taken.The core of the farm is an area of approximately one acre of mixed vegetable beds, supplemented by some greenhouses (looking west from Point A on the map)There were also some cut flower beds (looking southeast from Point B on the map)The area west of the greenhouses is home to a small flock of chickens and the vegetation is a savanna-like patchwork of mowed lawn, unmowed weeds, and widely-spaced small trees (looking north from Point C on the map)Further west are rows of berries (looking west from Point D on the map)A low fence separates the leased land from the neighboring hop yard (looking north from Point E on the map)A deer fence surrounds the leased land on the three other sides (looking west from Point F on the map) and includes the hop yard.
The closely-mowed lawn had its share of typical European lawn weeds, such as the two species of plantains, Red and White Clover, Dandelion, two species of crabgrass, and the usual set of European cold season grasses (Timothy, Tall Fescue, Kenntucky Bluegrass, and Smooth Brome Grass). However, it also had the native Common Blue Violet and Indian-tobacco, in addition to many of the native and non-native weeds also found in the tilled beds. I was surprised that in some areas, the most abundant grass (at least late in the summer) seemed to be the native Nimblewill Muhly (Muhlenbergia schreberi).
Closely-mowed lawn
The weeds in the tilled beds were the usual cohort of familiar annual warm-season weeds (Common Ragweed, Horseweed, Lamb’s-quarters, pigweeds, crabgrasses, foxtails, etc.), at least 25 different species in total.
Tilled beds
I did meet one new weed, which I had not seen on any other farm before: Clammy Glandular-goosefoot (Dysphania pumilio; since then also seen at the Hudson Valley Seed Company). Originally from Australia, it is suspected to have been introduced to North America as a contaminant in sheep’s wool and seems to have spread throughout southern New England and obviously into the southern Hudson Valley. It is also documented from a few isolated counties in other parts of New York.
Clammy Glandular-goosefoot (Dysphania pumilio)
Near one of the sheds, I spotted another (to me) unfamiliar weed, which I was able to key out as Urban Goosefoot (Chenopodium urbicum). Originally from Europe, it reportedly has established itself in scattered locations throughout Eastern North America and the Midwest. However, I have never noticed it in the Hudson Valley before.
Urban Goosefoot (Chenopodium urbicum)
Finally, the third new weed was Indian Strawberry (Potentilla indica). It grew under the blueberry bushes and its watery berry tasted of absolutely nothing! This species, which was introduced from India, still seems to be quite rare in our region, but is a common weed further south.
Indian Strawberry (Potentilla indica)
Two nightshades were growing as weeds near the compost pile, probably both wild-growing plants of cultivars. I suspect the one on the left with the larger flowers and rather smooth leaves to be a variety of tomatillo (possibly Physalis philadelphicus or P. ixocarpa). The one on the right, with the smaller flowers and hairy leaves is probably a variety of ground cherry (possibly Physalis peruviana). I don’t usually see these species growing in the wild, so don’t feel completely confident with their identification. If anybody has any alternative suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them!
Tomatillo (possibly Physalis philadelphicus or P. ixocarpa; left) and ground cherry (possibly Physalis peruviana; right)
Finally, let’s have a closer look at the unmowed herbaceous vegetation along the deer fences and the adjacent band of shrubs at the edge of the forest (this image shows the southeast corner of the deer fence). Along the fences, we have some of the usual edge suspects, such as the invasive Tree-of-Heaven, Multiflora Rose, and Oriental Bittersweet.
Vegetation along the perimeter deer fencein the southeast corner
However, along the south fence, we also spotted a small group of the native Early Goldenrod (Solidago juncea) growing out of some pallets. While not exactly a rare species, this goldenrod is not common, either. It does not compete well with the four rhizome-forming old field goldenrods that are generally very common in our landscape (though not at Transgenerational Farm). Note how the Early Goldenrod in the image is surrounded by the invasive Japanese Stiltgrass and adjacent to a patch of the almost ubiquitous invasive Mugwort.
Mugwort, Early Goldenrod, and Japanese Stiltgrass
Possibly the most common native wildflower along the south fence was the light-blue flowering Heart-leaved Aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium). It can be recognized by its large, heart-shaped stem leaves with sharply serrated margins. However, note the tiny leaves on the flowering branches!
Heart-leaved Aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium)
There were also a few plant of the native white-flowering Lance-leaved Aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum).
Lance-leaved Aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum)
The shrub layer along the forest edge certainly had its share of invasive species. Pictured here from left to right are Autumn Olive, Privet, and Multiflora Rose, but we also observed quite a few Japanese Barberry and Eurasian shrub honeysuckle (Lonicera morrowii or L. bella).
Shrubs along the deer fence on the northern boundary line
However, native shrubs and young trees from native species in the adjacent forest were also common along the edge, and we observed Staghorn Sumac, Sassafras, Black Walnut, American Elm, Sugar Maple, Red and Black Oak, Black Cherry, Hackberry, Red Cedar, White Pine, and even Hemlock. In fact, this was the only one of the nine farms visited this season, where we observed Hemlock.
Shrubs and trees along the deer fence on the northern boundary
Not surprising, given the very small size of Transgenerational Farm, we observed the least overall number of plant species here compared to the other eight farms we visited this season. Much of the native plant diversity we did observe occurred in the narrow, unmowed herbaceous and shrubby vegetation along the deer fence and in the adjacent forest.
Some Insect Notes.
by Conrad.
It was spitting rain on the 30th of August when we visited Transgenerational Farm. Neither the lateness of our visit nor the weather were propitious for seeing abundant butterfly life and, in fact, we only noted a quartet of butterflies – Pearl Crescent, Eastern Tailed-blue, Least Skipper, and Monarch. Nonetheless, the abundant ‘edge habitat’ that Claudia noted early makes me think that a sunny July visit would have resulted in substantially more sightings. And, besides, butterflies aren’t the only game in town…
Pearl Crescents can be one of our most common and long-flying butterflies.
In our own regional surveys, we have records from 21 April to 7 October (and they probably fly earlier and later, but we’re just not out surveying butterflies!). That doesn’t mean that there’s a constant Pearl Crescent spigot, instead there appear to be multiple broods, i.e., distinct batches who appear across the season. As I alluded to in an earlier post, Crescent taxonomy seems to be something of a mess, and multiple, sometimes overlapping, generations raise the possibility of ‘cryptic species’ – previously undetected species who, because of high similarity (at least in our eyes) to named species, go unnoticed. The Northern Crescent, a very similar looking butterfly, also seems to occur regionally. We also used to have a third species of Crescent – the Tawny Crescent, but that species has apparently nearly disappeared from the Northeast. Mind you, post a Crecent photo on iNaturalist, and few people are willing to go out on a limb and provide a species ID, plus genetics papers have detected some evidence of interbreeding, so who know what’s happening! (A paper published just this year, does suggest that these three species are more or less distinct, at least in the West.) Who thought such a ‘simple’, common butterfly could be so confusing?
Note the rain water… Alright, this butterfly has shown up in many of our previous blogs, so it’s time for a quiz – who is this little nipper?The blue iridescence of an Eastern Tailed-blue.
The Eastern Tailed-blue is another common butterfly, but why the tail? That little wisp looks like something of an afterthought and it’s hard to imagine its potential function, at least from this angle. But think of what it looks like with the wings closed…
An Eastern Tailed-blue (affectionately, we call these ETBs) with its wings closed. This is a photo from another farm, but it shows the species’ side view well.
If you were a bird dashing by in search of meal, mightn’t you sometimes mistake that tail and associated wing dots for eyes and antennae? Maybe you only make that mistake once in four times, but, from the perspective of the species, that’s a huge plus and pretty strong evolutionary selection. Indeed, not infrequently we see tailed butterflies whose tails have been replaced by beak-shaped gaps.
A dashing male Monarch.Feeling as if you’re seeing fewer Monarchs? Here’s a butterfly abundance chart from webutterfly.org, this is for Monarchs in NY (webutterfly.org reports the nationwide 4th of July butterfly counts organized by the North American Butterfly Association). Don’t worry about the small print. Each column is a year, abundance is on the vertical axis, and the time span is 1990 to 2022. It almost looks as if Monarch populations might be somewhat cyclical, but it will be interesting to see what the 2023 and 2024 data look like, not to mention what happens next year. We saw a few this year, but it didn’t feel like as many as in some previous years.Switching to bees… Honey Bees were out and about. I like this photo, taken on Knapweed, because it shows the hairy eyeballs of Honey Bees. Study a pollen-covered Honey Bee, and you’re likely to see that its vision is probably a little clouded by pollen sticking to its eye hairs.
Honey Bees are not native, they were brought from Eastern/Southern Europe by early European settlers because of their honey-making talents. (I do wonder how many sea-sick colonies survived the trans-Atlantic voyage; presumably the voyage would be made during Winter, using a hive stocked with Honey.) However, aside from honey, Honey Bees have another advantage – at least in part because of their honey-making and social skills, they can ‘get up early’ in the Spring and start pollinating while conditions are still relatively cold. Some native bees, such as bumble bees, mining bees, and mason bees, also get going early, and, in healthy ecosystems, they can usually handle the pollination demands of early fruit flowers, but Honey Bees are sometimes considered a safety net for Spring pollination. Aside from Spring, Honey Bees are usually pretty dogged in foraging during cool and rainy weather, as these images suggest. Unfortunately for the native bees, there’s some evidence that high Honey Bee populations can hamper native bee foraging.
Those Sunflowers certainly provide an appealing bull’s eye.Here, another Honey Bee is checking out the target.Another Sunflower fan, but this time probably a native mining bee.With their fuzzy thoraxes (the body part the wings attach to), carpenter bees can look a lot like large bumble bees, but their shiny abdomens (tail ends) distinguish them; bumble bees usually have fuzzy derrieres. This wasp (a Four-toothed Mason Wasp) looks a bit daunting, but it’s generally mild-mannered and solitary (i.e., you won’t need to face a swarm of them).
While adult Four-toothed Mason Wasps primarily feed on nectar and, perhaps, pollen, they prepare their young for the World by supplying the burrow-nursery of each cossetted egg with a live, but paralyzed caterpillar. When the egg hatches, the larva devours the caterpillar. Given that those caterpillars can sometimes be agricultural pests, such wasps have generally been classed as beneficials. Clearly, agronomists, not moths, are making that call.These elegant wasps, Blue-winged Scoliids, were very common during our visit. Indeed, whether it was season, weather, and/or ecological ambience, Transgenerational was where I saw the most of them.
Blue-winged Scoliid Wasps follow a slightly modified version of the Four-toothed Mason Wasp’s game plan. Like the previous wasp, the adults feed on nectar and pollen, hence the first image of them on flowers. But their time on the ground, as in the above photo, is spent looking for beetle grubs, specifically those of Japanese Rose Beetle and the Green June Bug. Once found, the grub is again paralyzed and an egg is laid upon it. On hatching the wasp larvae feeds on the adjacent grub. Again, since white grubs and Rose Beetles in particular are often considered pests, seeing a bunch of these likewise mild-mannered solitary wasps is an indication that biocontrol is in action.
A ground beetle (probably an Anisodactylus of some flavor). In the photo above, this beetle appears to be feeding on the pollen of Common Ragweed.
Many of our so-called “beneficials” are generalists. Spiders, for example, will seemingly eat a bee or prey mantis (both considered “beneficials” in their own right) with as much gusto as they will consume some hapless, pestiferous herbivore. Likewise, many of our ground beetles will happily eat seeds and/or pollen of an array of plants, whether those happen to be your crops or your weeds. Life is complicated and the net effects of these creatures on production will depend on your particular agroecosystem. Certainly, some generalization are possible, but nothing can completely substitute for keeping an eye out for the creatures you see in action in your own fields.
Yellow Foxtail and a vetch mix in a Carpenter Road field.
These Hawthorne Valley Farm-managed fields are comprised of hay field, pasture and ploughed ground and are leased from three nonfarmer land owners. They are interspersed with a few hedgerows and wood patches. The parcels are located along Carpenter Road, just north of Philmont, Columbia County. The eastern property belongs to Arthur’s Point Farm, a native plant nursery with ongoing reforestation/orchard establishment on some of its fields. The western property has a small apple orchard managed by the owner, but that was outside of our survey area.
A 2021 image of the fields surveyed. The lettered squares refer to the sites of the landscape photographs shown below.A 1948 aerial of the same area. Other than the pond and the southwest forest block, little has changed.Looking north-northeast from near point A. The far hill (where Black Swallowtails were later observed hilltopping) has been planted with tree-tube-protected young trees by the landowner.Looking ca. due west from point B.Looking west-southwest from point C.Looking more or less west from point D. Carpenter Road is just out of view to the right.
As we did in our Harrier Fields post, this one is a multi-organismal extravaganza, what follows is Claudia describing plants, Conrad describing mainly butterflies, and Will describing birds. You can use the below anchor points to navigate to your favorite section:
The botanical survey only included agricultural areas managed by Hawthorne Valley Farm and some adjacent non-agricultural habitats. The following map shows the approximate routes walked during the survey. Numbers indicate points/areas where botanical observations were made. I will refer to them throughout this blog.
Most of the field north of the entrance of Eagle Rock Road (#1 on the map) was dominated by Yellow Foxtail, an annual, warm-season grass originally from Europe, which seemed to be doing particularly well on tilled ground on several farms we visited this year. The area of greener, lower vegetation visible here is a wet spot in the field (#2), which supports sedges and Sensitive Fern. The yellow strip of vegetation along the edge of the field (#3) is a wet meadow that is fenced off and does not get tilled.
Field north of entrance to Eagle Rock Road (#1, 2, 3 on map)
These delightful flowers of an unusual color belong to an uncommon European annual with a fun name: Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis), which is also referred to as “Poor-man’s Weatherglass,” because it supposedly closes its flowers when the sky becomes cloudy, “Red Chickweed,” for obvious reasons, or “Poison Chickweed,” because it contains toxins. We find this small plant occasionally along roadsides and in tilled fields (#1), but in our region, it never seems to become common enough to consider it a serious agricultural weed.
Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis)
Another uncommon European weed spotted in the same field (#1) is Flower-of-an-hour (Hibiscus trionum), which has a flower of typical Hibiscus-shape, but unusual color combination.
Flower-of-an-hour (Hibiscus trionum)
The unmowed wet meadow at the field edge (#3) was composed of mostly native wildflowers, including four kinds of goldenrods, Blue Vervain (Verbena hastata), Pilewort (Erechtites hieraciifolius), Spotted Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), Spotted Joe-Pye-weed (Eutrochium maculatum). It also harbored some invasive species, such as Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense), which is a European species that might better be referred to as “Creeping Thistle,” to avoid the common misconception that this species is native to this continent.
Wet meadow (#3)
The pastures and hayfields (#11) appeared mostly green from a distance.
Pasture/hayfield (#11)
Looking closer, they were composed of quite a variety of plant species: European cold-season grasses mixed with European clovers: White Clover (Trifolium repens), Red Clover (Trifolium pratense), and Bird’s-foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). One can also see the European Common Bedstraw or “Wild Madder” (Galium mollugo) and Wild Carrot (Daucus carota), as well as the ubiquitous Yellow Foxtail (Setaria pumila).
Two native species that were quite common in these perennial pastures/hayfields, were Horse-nettle (Solanum carolinense) and Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca).
A closer look at the plant community of a perennial pasture/hayfield (#11)
This shrub swamp (#18) is part of a small wetland complex that also includes an ancient swamp forest (#15), which seems to have never been completely cleared for agriculture. The center of the shrub swamp is dominated by the native Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), which tolerates year-round “wet feet.” Some of the edges of the shrub swamp are dominated by the invasive Reed Canary Grass (Phalaris arundinacea; seen in the foreground).
Buttonbush shrub swamp (#18)
A closer look at the Buttonbush reveals its tell-tale spherical seed heads. In mid summer, each of these spheres was covered with small, white, tubular flowers that are very attractive to a variety of pollinators.
Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis)
This curious-looking vine is Burr-cucumber (Sicyos angulatus), a native member of the cucurbit family.
Burr-cucumber (Sicyos angulatus)
It was enthusiastically growing on Eurasian honeysuckle shrubs (Lonicera morrowii or. L. bella) around the edge of the Buttonbush swamp. This is one of the North American species considered invasive in parts of Europa and Asia.
Edge of buttonbush shrub swamp (#18)
There were several unmowed, herbaceous field edges (e.g., this east edge of #19), which support a vegetation composed of typical pasture/hayfield plants and native species, such as asters and goldenrods, which don’t tolerate mowing/grazing very well. These margins serve as sanctuaries for insects, as pantry for seed-eating birds, and provide shelter for all sorts of wildlife.
Unmowed field edge (#19)
A small rocky knoll (#20) drew my attention because of its potential for unique plants.
Rocky knoll (#20)
On the rocks themselves I found a number of mosses and lichens not seen elsewhere on the Carpenter Road Farmland (but not uncommon in the larger region). There was also a small patch of Ebony Spleenwort (Aspleniumplatyneuron) a native fern tolerant of dry conditions. The plants in the foreground are Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea jacea), a European meadow species with thistle-like flowers that often invades dry pastures in our area.
Some of the plants, including the fern Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron) on the rock outcrop.
While an interesting scenic feature, the rock outcrop and surrounding dry pasture proved to be not as botanically-rich as hoped. One reason might be that this area has the only shade trees in this pasture, which might result in heavy use and associated trampling of the vegetation by grazing animals. (A snag on the knoll did seem to be a nesting site for American Kestrels.)
View west from the rock outcrop and shade trees (#20) across a hayfield (#21)
In contrast, the unmowed shore of this nearby pond was one of the few places on the land where native wetland plants abounded. These included two species of cat-tails (Typha latifolia and T. angustifolia), several species of sedges (Carex spp.) and bulrushes (Scirpus spp.), a nutsedge (Cyperus sp.) and a spikerush (Eleocharis cf. obtusa).
Pond (#23) with unmowed shoreline and a diverse plant community
The tall vegetation next to the pond also supported the elaborate nets (with their characteristic zig-zag pattern) of several large Garden Spiders (Argiope aurantia).
Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia)
The pond itself had some patches of floating duckweeds, which are often mistaken for algae. Instead, they are miniscule plants (which actually have microscopic flowers that grow directly on the floating leaves). This floating carpet seemed to be composed of at least three different species: the largest leaves belong to Common Duckmeal (Spirodela polyrhiza), the medium-sized ones to Common Duckweed (Lemna minor), and the really tiny ones to one or several species of watermeal (Wolffia spp.).
Several species of duckweeds floating in the pond (#23)
On an old compost pile near the silos south of the pond (#24), I discovered a big patch of the invasive Japanese Hops (Lupulus japonicas).
Japanese Hops (Lupulus japonicas)
On the south side of Carpenter Road, there are three big fields (#27-29) with different plant compositions.
Three fields south of Carpenter Road (#27-29)
The unmowed, untilled field margin between #27 and #28 harbored a mix of native and non-native plants, including some tall thistles.
Unmowed, untilled field margin between fields #27 and #28
Closer inspection helped identify them as the native Field Thistle (Cirsium discolor), identifiable by their large flower heads and the characteristic white stripes on their spiny bracts (the otherwise green, little leaves that surround the flower head in a tile-like arrangement).
Field Thistle (Cirsium discolor)
The tilled field (#28) had a cover crop of Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) and an abundance of annual agricultural weeds, including the native Common Yellow Nutsedge (Cyperus esculentus; in the foreground) and three species of introduced foxtails (Setaria spp.).
A field (#28) with a cover crop of Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)
Three seed heads of foxtails growing side-by-side in the Buckwheat cover crop: Green, Giant, and Yellow Foxtail (Setaria viridis, S. faberi, and S. pumila; from bottom to top, respectively).
Green, Giant, and Yellow Foxtail (Setaria viridis, S. faberi, and S. pumila; from bottom to top, respectively)
Another pond (#32) also supported a diverse wetland vegetation along its unmowed margins.
Another pond (#32) with diverse wetland vegetation
American Bur-reed (Sparganium americanum) was one of ten native species not noticed anywhere else during this inventory.
American Bur-reed (Sparganium americanum)
The herbaceous/shrubby field margin (south edge of #29) harbored a mix of invasive (note the ample Japanese Stiltgrass, Microstegium vimineum, in the bottom left corner of the image), native (Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, and goldenrods, Solidago spp.), and European (Wild Carrot, Daucus carota) species. The structural diversity of such “soft edges” attracts certain songbirds and the diversity of plant species provides floral resources for pollinators.
Herbaceous/shrubby field margin (south edge of #29)
Finally, a wet meadow (#37) along a small stream was exceptional in its density of native, late-summer flowers, including those of several species of goldenrods, Spotted Joe-Pye-weed (Eutrochium maculatum), Spotted Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), and Purple-stemmed Aster (Symphyotrichum puniceum). The latter was not seen anywhere else during this survey.
It was a generally warm and sunny 27th of August when I made my way around the Carpenter Road fields. I more or less followed the route shown below, winding through the open farm fields.
My approximate path chasing butterflies on 27 Aug.For much of my outing, I encountered the standard set of farm-field butterflies, such as this Clouded Sulphur.While this looks a lot like a Clouded Sulphur, note the slightly more orangish tinge.When it takes to the wing, that egg-yolk orange becomes strikingly more apparent.Orange Sulphurs are considered dietary “Switchers” (a term coined by Boston butterflier, Sharon Stichter). That means that, while they are a native butterfly and their caterpillars doubtless can feed on native legumes, they’ve been able to add widespread non-native legumes, such as Alfalfa, to their diets. Life doesn’t stand still!Another example, although not a butterfly I saw on this day, is the Wild Indigo Duskywing – its original food was Wild Indigo (when was the last time you saw that plant?), but it has grown to like Crown Vetch, and so is a regular in our landscape.A male Eastern Tailed-blue, top, and a female, bottom. Females are grey; males are blue.These are widespread little butterflies who feed on a range of legumes.Another of our more common butterflies (as you’ll know if you have been following our earlier posts!): the Least Skipper.A fresh looking male Monarch.This Monarch caterpillar was probably getting close to pupating. For me, the easiest way to find a caterpillar on milkweed is by looking for the frass (aka caterpillar poop). Those are the little brown pellets visible on the leaf below the caterpillar. Notice that even in late August, this caterpillar had been able to find a moderately young milkweed plant (those leave still look nice and fresh). This emphasizes a point made in an earlier post – having a range of milkweed ages on a farm is probably your best bet for supporting Monarchs, especially if you try to make sure that there’s a good stock of youngish plants come mid-Summer, when Monarchs generally seem to be most common in our neighborhood (see below).This graph shows the average number of Monarchs we have seen during butterfly surveys here in Columbia County and nearby areas. It’s a ‘napkin’ sketch, in that I didn’t try to correct for survey length, etc., but it does show that we don’t really have a Monarch turn out until July, so making sure they have fresh milkweed available then could be good. Milkweed will usually resprout if clipped, and so cutting back portions of a May or early June milkweed patch could result in nice, tender shoot for those late Summer arrivals. (The October peak shown above may well reflect passing migrants.)The Silver-spotted Skipper is relatively big and common, ergo one of the most frequently seen of our skippers.A Great Spangled Fritillary. This was not a particularly good year for this species, and we only saw them occasionally.We did, however, see relatively large numbers of their southern kin (more to come below).Not a great shot, but it does document the presence of Pearl Crescent. Some people think this “species” might actually contain two or more cryptic species.A red meadowhawk. Yes, I know, that’s not a species, but if I said it were a White-faced Meadowhawk or a Ruby Meadowhawk, then I would be whistling in the wind.As I was writing this blog post on 13 November at the nearby Hawthorne Valley home farm, this individual flew in. Air temperature was at or below 40F, albeit with a clear sun. This is likely a male Yellow-legged (aka Autumn) Meadowhawk, a relative of the above species, and just serves to indicate the fortitude of some of these late-season species. I can imagine he was finding rather slim pickings in terms of other flying insects to eat.A male Black Swallowtail.
As I’ve tried to illustrate with this photograph, Black Swallowtails seem to be especially dedicated “hilltoppers”, often gathering atop hills. Perhaps this facilitates mating, a sort of innate “I’ll meet you at the top of the hill” social club.
We’ve seen the Common Buckeye in a previous post, but it’s hard to pass up this exotic-looking creature. This is primarily a southern species, only edging it way north during some years. In fact, looking at i-naturalist, our Columbia County observations mark their northernmost forays in the Hudson Valley during 2024. Although they also extended into New Hampshire and Maine this year.
Here’s another southerner who pushed north this year – the Common Checkered Skipper. Again, this is i-naturalist’s northernmost Hudson Valley sighting this year. There were apparently no New England records in 2024, however, it’s admittedly not as eye-catching as the Common Buckeye.
Another southerner and, to me, the most surprising – a Variegated Fritillary, a relative of the Great Spangled shown earlier. We only had one or two previous records from Columbia County (where Carpenter Road is located). All of those were of single individuals. And then, lo and behold, there was not just one, but several of these cavorting in a Buckwheat field.
Clearly, ‘spider web on pumpkin’ camouflage.
And even more surprising, they were mating!
It’s a blurry picture, but it is an action shot – a pair of mated Variegateds in flight. As is understandable, only one of the mated pair tries to fly while the other forms a hanging keel of sorts. As I recall, a given species is fairly consistent in terms of which sex flies and which goes along for the ride, but I don’t think it’s the same pattern holds across all species. Something to look up when I get a chance…
As we were preparing this, Will asked me why we observed so many southern butterflies this year. Aside from the species mentioned above, elsewhere in the region we or colleagues saw Giant Swallowtail, Cloudless Sulphur, Fiery Skipper, and Little Yellow – all of whom are also southern species. It’s hard to know for sure why this was the case. These are all southern species who have been recorded to occasionally make northern forays. For some of these species there are even 19th century records of such movements. One can imagine that such species are always probing the northern margins of their distribution, and when populations are particularly high farther south and/or conditions are particularly amenable farther north, they then appear in our area. Is their local appearance due to climate change? Could well be, but I don’t think we know enough about their ecologies to really pinpoint the cause of their appearances this past year. Time will tell whether this was a fluke year or, instead, the start of a trend. An interesting management question is, should we ‘plant ahead’? For example, should we seed more Partridge Pea or Prickly Ash (also southern species) so that the Cloudless Sulphur, Little Yellow and Giant Swallowtail find welcoming host plants for their caterpillars when they show up?
What appears to be Bombus vagans, the Half-black Bumble Bee.Here we have what looks to be Bombus impatiens, the Eastern Bumble Bee, but what is most interesting to me about this picture is comparing where these two bees are carrying their collected pollen. The Bumble Bee sports leg panniers, officially known as ‘corbicula’. These are widened, largely bare portions of their hind legs that are surrounded by long, pollen-retaining hairs. The bee on the right, in the family Megachilidae (Leaf cutter bees and their kin), is taking a different approach – it sticks the pollen to the fuzz on the bottom of its abdomen. Evidently, for thistle pollen at least, both approaches work.Hey Mom, there’s some guy over here stalking butterflies…
The three Hawthorne-managed properties owned by three different households that we will simply refer to as “Carpenter Road” contains a broad range of habitats and with it, a broad diversity of birds to match. I visited these properties on June 24.
A common theme throughout my blog posts has been an investigation of unmanaged or lightly-managed edges, which can be productive foraging areas for birds seeking seeds and insects. These areas need not be designed and planted as wildlife strips, but rather through willful neglect can host a higher plant diversity than closely mowed lanes. That plant diversity often leads to structural diversity which provides cover for birds and insect diversity which provides food.
The Savannah Sparrow, a species of concern in NYS is quick to make use of unmowed edges around farm fields. Photo credit: Mike Birmingham
The diversity of native and naturalized vegetation provides many opportunities for a variety of bird to nest and feed
Barn Swallows and Red-winged Blackbirds foraged over the fields of grain on Carpenter Road and as one moved south of the road, a mature hedgerow of native trees and lightly managed meadow hosted an entirely different set of forest and shrub-loving species of birds.
American Robin, Carolina Wren, Downy Woodpecker, Field Sparrow, Gray Catbird, House Wren, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Orchard Oriole, and Yellow-throated Vireo could be found in the hedgerow. Another guild of water-loving species could be found near the small pond there including Common Grackle, Red-winged Blackbird, Warbling Vireo, and Yellow Warbler.
Because of the ephemeral nature of their preferred habitat, Chestnut-sided Warblers rarely stay in the same place for more than a decade or so. Photo: Mike Birmingham.
The song of the Chestnut-sided Warbler ‘Pleased Pleased Pleased to MEETcha!‘ rang from a group of young Red Maples. This bird can nest in a very small patch of suitable habitat, but they prefer young trees and thickets. Historically, this was a bird that followed natural disturbance or even logging, taking advantage of rapidly regrowing trees and shrubs. Once forests mature, this species moves on to other young patches. It’s likely that some part of the farm south of Carpenter Road was abandoned a few decades ago (see the 1940s aerial photo on Conrad’s post!) and the trees are in that habitat ‘sweet spot’ for this warbler.
We’ve lost about half the number of Chestnut-sided Warblers in North America since the 1960s as much of their suitable early successional forest has matured since the peak of agricultural abandonment a century ago. They likely colonized forests after fire and storm damage and in the wake of abandoned beaver meadows before European settlement. It’s possible that they were even rarer than today in the North America centuries ago of mature forest punctuated with Native American fields and encampments. This warbler has also suffered from severe habitat depletion on its wintering grounds in Central America as tropical foothills have been cleared to raise coffee. It is well documented that reputable “shade grown” coffee, from plantations that retain an intact canopy of native tropical tree species, greatly benefit this species. Something to ponder as we make our caffeine purchasing choices.
Chestnut-sided Warblers forage in leaves, searching for caterpillars, fly larvae, spiders, and leaf hoppers. They nest fairly close the the ground in shrubs, rarely more than six feet off the ground. They form monogamous pair bonds and actively defend their small nesting territories from neighboring species of warblers and other songbirds. It usually requires a good pair of binoculars to see them well, but once you track down this fast flitting species the spring males in particular can be a stunning reward of color.
To the north of Carpenter Road, Hawthorne Valley farmers have interplanted cereal grains in a matrix of clover and other cover crops.
A quick drive by and this field of wheat looks like any other…
A closer look shows that these cereal grains are not conventionally grown in a no-till regime with glyphosate herbicide because the edges and understory still host other photosynthesizing plants…
This understructure of clover and other forbs provides an essential understory for insects, the primary summer food for all North American songbirds
Conventionally grown row crops can be fairly unbirdy places since there is limited cover and very little to eat. Historic records, however, suggest that early American fields of rye and wheat were once suitable nesting sites for a variety of grassland birds and Carpenter Road fields may illustrate one reason for the difference. So-called Round-Up Ready cereal crops that are drilled and then sprayed with broad-scale herbicides create fields that are so clean, so devoid of weeds, that they are entirely new agricultural landscapes. No 19th-Century farmer, no matter how fertile their soil, or however many times they cultivated, could match the ‘cleanliness’ of even the most average conventionally grown cereal crop today. Combine that with our ability to use heavy equipment to push out and even landforms to enable farmers to plant hedgerow to hedgerow explains why grassland birds are among the fastest declining guild of birds in North America. There simply isn’t enough habitat left in the Upper Midwest (or here in the Northeast where cereal crops are declining but still a valuable crop in some areas) to provide critical shelter and food.
As I walked through these wheat fields I wondered if this land would support grassland birds and I soon noticed Eastern Meadowlarks flushing from the field. A short distance later Savannah Sparrows foraged and I heard the insect zzzzzzz of a Grasshopper Sparrow.
The striking yellow breast and black chevron on the chest make the Eastern Meadowlark unmistakable. Photo: Mike Birmingham.
We still have a lot of upland meadows in the Hudson Valley, but the vast majority of those fields are intensively hayed with multiple cuttings. As we discussed in the Churchtown blog, this recent intensification of land use presents a level of disturbance that is incompatible with the needs of many grassland breeding birds. The Carpenter Road fields consisting of grains without herbicide and lightly used pastures do provide suitable levels of land use intensity and grassland birds are likewise present.
We must always be careful in ornithology to distinguish between the positive presence of birds and positive breeding outcomes. Grassland birds have an innate biological attraction to open fields regardless of the land use intensity and their mere presence does not guarantee that they are maintaining sustainable populations at that site since they could be attracted to large open areas that ultimately serve as traps where breeding fails. That said, in only a few moments of searching I was able to locate a few nests with eggs.
This Savannah Sparrow nest with eggs was located in the exact tussock of pasture grasses shown to the right. This nest existed in a field recently grazed by cows but the stocking rate was low enough to leave a few uneaten patches of vegetation used by this sparrow.
The Arthur’s Point silvopastures and tree nursery are unique habitats, with grass species similar to adjacent pastures but with greater structural diversity and the obvious hunting perches the young saplings provide. Early successional species such as Field Sparrow, Brown Thrasher, Common Yellowthroat, and Chipping Sparrow were common. Tree and Barn Swallows foraged over the meadow and Eastern Kingbird hunted from fence posts and trees.
Landscape structures like this are inherently ephemeral in the Northeast. Somedisturbance — be it from mower or cattle — is needed to keep mature trees in check. This tension between field and forest can create a transitional habitat that is very productive for birds.
A Grasshopper Sparrow nested at the base of the white plastic electric fence post
In the short 20 minute walk up and around this hill, I counted two Grasshopper Sparrow nests and counted at least 8 birds, some possibly so-called hatching year birds that fledged at this location. This was a high-quality site for this species as several paired adults were preparing second clutches.
The Carpenter Road complex hosted about a dozen or so Grasshopper Sparrows in total which is likely the highest density for this species in Columbia County and among the highest I’ve ever found in the Hudson Valley!
Many of the farms I visited for this project have made some deliberate attempt to manage lands lightly or to leave some habitat unmanaged. In many ways these practices have led to higher-than-expected avian richness. Are there models contained in these farms that can be shared? Improved? Better studied? Will these models be enough to shelter and support birdlife as climate change mounts challenges even on protected land? Can conventional high-production farms be encouraged to leave more room for ecology as they are squeezed by market forces to become more efficient to survive? What does a farm of the 21st Century look like and who are the new stewards?
As many have written before, birds are a wonderful group of organisms for measuring, and educating others about ecological states. They are of a scale easily observed by amateurs, with memorable colors and sounds, and their populations in many instances wax and wane in rapid response to our actions. How can we coexist– or better, thrive — in same world?
Conrad captured this American Goldfinch during his end-of-summer visit to Carpenter Road
Farmer-Ecologist Research Circle 