jinian | biology adventure day! (Reply)

Ate tasty pie made from apples and eggs from happy hens.

Inspected PEAS, which are FLOWERING. Put three of them in pots to take to rubricity.

Saw rubricity's giant dog and four other dogs.

Identified garden plants (that one does seem to be a mock-orange, "blizzard" or "snowflake" type) and helped an ailing honeybee to a flower.

Ate sushi, which comes from nature. Yes.

Went to Schmitz Reserve Park and basked in native plants. Pulled out two invaders, a holly and an ivy, which they encourage you to do!

And, just when I thought adventuring was all over for the day, thatmathchick had BEES in her yard, so I went to help see what to do about them. Incredibly cool. Small bumblebees (probably Bombus ternarius but maybe B. fervidus or B. borealis) had built a nest of about six square inches under the tarp she'd used to protect a bike from the weather over the winter, right on the ground. We could see the queen (a little under 2cm long), a bunch of workers (slightly smaller), a mysterious small black bee, and a hexagonal comb built on the ground containing several honey-pots to one side, curled larvae, and some reddish pupae on another edge. They seemed pretty mellow, probably because it had been a bit cool all day and it was eight by then, so we put a box with a side entrance over them and retrieved the bike. They currently have an edge of a tarp over them besides the cardboard box, in case it rains. Plans exist for a modified-pallet bee house.

Oh, and the other day I was dumping out the pot of my Martha Washington geraniums, which didn't survive the cold winter, and found ANTS a seething mass of ANTS! So I ran away. (What? They were the bitey kind!) Then I sneaked up and put the pot back on, and ran them off to a distant point of the yard. They'd deserted by the time I wanted to show them to Wim. Very startling experience!

Yay for warmer weather.