CanBugs, CANPOLIN, Can Bulbs Survive

For those of you who answered the above pictured question with ‘where are the pollinators?’, well, that is a timely question as honeybees seem to be on the ropes and native pollinators in decline.

Or are they? Well, the truth be told, we don’t really know because with few exceptions we have pretty much put all of our bees in one basket. However, the time may be coming when the other 99% of pollinators – e.g. the for-get-me-not frequenting flower fly below– receive their due attention.

Flower flies (aka hoverflies, Syrphidae) were one of the pollinator groups that were well represented in presentations last week at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of Canada and the Entomological Society of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Usually I would consider attending such a meeting additional work, but this time it was vacation – perhaps the reason I had an unusually good time for a bug meeting. Not that sitting on one’s butt from 8 am until 5 pm listening to bug talks, not even with the aid of fly papers, is all that easy, but the friends, fine food, and Forks all made for a pleasant time. ‘Winterpeg’ was anything but wintry, the simple monument at Louis Riel’s grave among the Dutch doomed elms in the Saint Boniface churchyard strangely moving, and the bug science less debased by climate change hyperbole than has become usual. However, it was the plethora of papers on pollinators that made the meeting for me.

Anyone who answered the question in the picture above with the Laphria on the left (a robberfly, Asilidae) must have missed the doubly unfortunate damselfly and mites.

But if I were to ask harder questions, such as ‘what species is the bumblebee?’ or ‘how is it doing?’, I’d have no idea how to answer them.

Such ignorance, however, may be short-lived, thanks to the newly initiated CANPOLIN (Canadian Pollination Initiative). At long last the government seems to be getting serious about protecting this critical agricultural and natural ecosystem function. Let’s hope CANPOLIN can develop the basic tools and information Canadians need to answer basic questions about and to understand, utilize and conserve their pollinator heritage.

I hope to enlist the Home Bug Garden in this effort, and do what I can, but I don’t suppose I can do much this year. Winter is upon us in Edmonton. The trees are mostly bare, the ground cold and soggy, the days short, and what sun there is too weak to generate vitamin D. What a perfect time to plant Spring bulbs! Ha, well my bloody Dutch bulb growers seem to think so – the missing bulbs arrived yesterday in a box soggy with melting snow a month after the optimal time to put them in the ground.

Two hours after I got home, the bulbs were all planted in the long ago prepared beds or in pots as Adrian suggested (see Comments in previous post). I suppose I can look at this as an experiment. Hybrid tulips should have enough stored reserves to bloom next Spring, but probably won’t have enough of a root system to generate healthy new bulbs. As for the species tulips, grape hyacinth, and spring glories that made up most of the shipment, I don’t know, but I put in enough of these from local shops at the end of September to make a fair comparison. I'm just glad the ground thawed while I was in Winnipeg and I didn't have to break out the pickaxe.

Of Bulbs, Bugs, & Below Zero: Frozen in an Alien Landscape

Today is Canadian Thanksgiving and we are into our fifth day of subzero (Celsius) temperatures and snow in this Zone 3 Home Bug Garden. I’ve only been keeping good temperature records since 2005, but weather this cold (it hasn’t been above -2 C since last Wednesday) is unprecedented in my Garden Journal. It’s not the earliest for snow (that was 9 September 2004), but I'm afraid that 5 consecutive days below zero means that is it for the bugs and flowers this year and all I’ll have in store for this blog is dreams of bug gardens past. I left out the last of the Rainbow Swiss Chard, because it is supposed to be cold hardy. We will see.

The chard had a hard time this summer, with lots of beet leaf miners, probably Pegomya hyoscyami (Panzer). We may have pictures of the adults, but they are indistinguishable from the numerous other small grey flies in the Home Bug Garden fauna. The small white eggs are laid on the underside of leaves and the maggots penetrate the leaf, feed between the two surfaces of the leaf, and cause large brown blotches. At first I thought they were interesting, but several generations later, I hate them. There’s no chemical control for home owners, but crushing their eggs can feel rewarding, in an impotent, chemical-free way. Picking and destroying the older, outside leaves preferred by the flies is also recommended, but seems to have no effect– the neighbourhood seems to have a large endemic population of the flies, probably from many years of people growing beets and ignoring the blotches.

Well, so much for the flies, back to this cold, nasty weather – is it unprecedented? As a conservative check on just how unusual a long freeze in early October is, I went to the Environment Canada website and the Edmonton City Centre Airport and their Climate Data Online button. It is a bit complicated and unintuitive, but eventually I was able to find the monthly reports that included maximum and minimum temperatures for downtown Edmonton going back to 1937 (Edmonton City Centre AWOS [2009-2005], A (2005-1937]). You have to go back 50 years, to 1959, to find another stretch of 5 days with below zero maximum temperatures in the first half of October (and then again in 1957) – so very unusual, but not unprecedented. Below freezing daily highs are more common in the second half of October (e.g. in 2004 – the year of the 5 cm snowfall on September 9), but above freezing and even relatively warm temperatures are more the norm.

The City Centre Airport shows a distinct Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI) compared to my backyard records and is usually another several degrees warmer at night than the International Airport (records to 1961) in the countryside south of town. However, a long stretch of subzero days in the first half of October is unprecedented in the last 48 years at the International Airport (which opened in 1960 - presumably the fields where the airport would be in 1959 would have had the same cold stretch as Downtown in 1959). So, why all this harping on cold? Well, the ground is frozen and I’m still waiting for my Dutch Spring bulb order!

One could argue that a Home Bug Gardener would be better planting native, rather than exotic bulbs. After all aren’t native plants good and alien plants bad (or at least suspect)? Alas, the native-alien divide is one of those twilight zones where the science becomes gray and shadowed by politics and beliefs trump facts. My Australian instilled aversion to invaders is still trying to come to grips with Alberta’s recently deglaciated landscape awash with relatively recent invaders. But whichever side of the invasive species controversy I eventually come down on, science or xenophobia, I know that after the long nasty winters here, I need some cheerful flowers as early in the Spring as possible. So what does Alberta have to offer in the way of native bulbs?

To answer that question, of course, one has to first define ‘bulb’ (‘Alberta’ being well defined and ‘native’ seems okay when not scrutinized). Bulb does have a reasonably precise technical definition relating to food-filled underground shoots and leaves, but after the botany final exam is over, no one seems to adhere to the limited concept, but instead embraces any underground storage organ that looks bulbish to them. To avoid more confusion than is necessary, my definition of a bulb is anything listed in the bulb bible: “Bulbs” Revised Edition 2002 by John E. Bryan (Timber Press, Portland OR). So tubers, corms, rhizomes, and some fat roots qualify.

Much to my surprise, I find that I have planted 4 Albertan true bulbs (Allium cernuum, Allium schoenoprasum [chives], Lilium philadelphicum, Camassia quamash), one AB ‘bulb’ (Maianthemum canadense), and three ‘bulbs’ from nearby areas that might reasonably have been expected to eventually make it to Alberta on their own (Iris setosa, Iris versicolor, Liatris spicata). That’s the good news. The bad news is that none of these plants is so foolish as to produce flowers in the earliest spring! In fact the Liatris (aka Blazing Star or Gayfeather) is sitting frozen in mid-bloom at the moment. No, spring colour is up to the 60-odd accessions (i.e. named species, varieties, or cultivars) of exotic alien bulbs – the vast majority of which do their best to add some early spring colour to the HBG.

Yes, it is true, the Home Bug Gardener has planted almost 10 times as many species/varieties of alien bulbs as of North American natives. I’m a bad, bad, bad native gardener, or at least not much of a purist. And that’s okay with me, because after 8 months of winter, I need to see something attractive in the garden, even if it is an evil alien. Not that these plants are especially bug-friendly. It is true that the bees and flies that are around will visit many of them, but not with the same fervour that they go after later bloomers. The earliest HBG bloomer, the native coltsfoot (Petasites palmatus), really is a bee magnet. But then again, so are many of the exotics that put in an appearance later in the Spring. The bees and bugs may be particular about what they feed on, but I don’t think they have any bias about country of origin.

Borage, Butterflies, and Bimbos: Reflections in the Rain

It was a grey and dreary morning in the Home Bug Garden, three days past the first killing frost of the Fall. The Home Bug Gardener and his wife were grumpy and poorly slept. On the positive side, the drought had relaxed a bit last night into an extended drizzle, doubly appreciated for its dampening effect on the party in the revolving rental next door. Not enough rain to short circuit the blasting boom boxes or drown out the bikinied bimbos blabbering in the rented hot tub. Nor enough to wet down to the buried bulbs that should be spreading roots in preparation for next Spring’s bursting forth. Enough, however, to keep me inside and blearily reading blogs, rather than ranting at the neer-do-wells next door, and to put me into an alliterative ambience about better times with borage, butterflies, and not so noisy neighbours.

Today, I’m beholden to The Far North Garden for my stringing consonants on my blog instead of spewing curses at the neighbours. Among the many well written and balanced postings available for whiling away a Sunday morning in a non-confrontational manner was a recent one on volunteer borage (Borago officinalis), one of my favourite alien plants. As a home bug gardener, I suppose I should claim that I plant borage for the bees, but really I like its “feed me” ‘Little Shop of Horror’ looks. Besides, I only planted it once five years ago and after that it has planted itself. Every year now I can enjoy its true blue flowers and spindly and spiny spread with no additional effort.

An added bug garden advantage of borage is that when the Painted Lady Butterflies (Vanessa cardui) make one of their rare, northward migrations into Edmonton (last one was 2005), their caterpillars love it. Of course, even a home bug gardener isn’t necessarily delighted with spiny black caterpillars devouring their plants (they hammered the lupines, yarrow, and globe thistle too), but a bit of plant biomass seems a small price to pay for the silent beauty of the Painted Lady. Also, those were the days when an acoustic guitar hootenanny was the worst we could expect from the rental neighbours and getting enough sleep is a pre-requisite to rational approaches to garden problems. Our rational approach was to let them feed (except on the newly planted globe thistle) and we now have enough of all of these plants that we would welcome another migration.

Although the rare Painted Lady migrations get the local Altalepers pretty excited, another rare migrant is far better known – the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Edmonton is far enough north and deficient enough in native milkweeds, the larval food, that the Monarch is a rare visitor. In 2007, however, we had the extraordinary delight to encounter a visiting Monarch in our backyard, watch it oviposit, and enjoy its larvae later chowing down on our ‘butterfly weed’.

Actually, although the seed packet from the Devonian claimed our milkweed was the Butterflyweed Asclepias tuberosa, a beautiful and not very aggressive plant with flat heads of orange flowers that would be marginally hardy here (usually rated to Zone 4), what actually emerged from the ground was a much more vigorous monster. I believe this is Swamp or Rose Milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, which has ball-like umbels of pinkish lavender flowers and wandering roots that quickly took over our primary potager bed. Once its roots were contained in a smaller bed, however, it became a welcome addition to our garden.

By an extraordinary stroke of luck, my wife and I also had the delight to watch a new Monarch Butterfly emerge from our milkweed and fly away, presumably to eventually head for Mexico. That is about as good as it gets in the Home Bug Garden – the rare opportunity to contribute to an insect phenomenon that actually has a lot of popular appeal. Alas, no monarchs or painted ladies have graced our garden since then, and with the climate seemingly in for a long cold spell, I wonder if we will ever see them again? On the other hand, as I recall the renters that summer were even worse than the current batch and we were treated to flashing red lights and a police helicopter with search light scanning the neighbourhood at 3:30 in the morning after one particularly violent party. No sense in dwelling on the negative though. Perhaps the sun will wake up and shed some extra warmth, another monarch will grace our milkweed, and the next batch of renters will be a nice, quiet family.

Frog spit & colour morphs: Pseudodiversity & other false ideas

Frog spit and spittlebugs are one of those childhood memories that now evoke mixed feelings. Did I really eagerly plunge finger tips into poop and plant-sap spittle and react with joy when uncovering a frothing froghopper nymph?

Well, that’s how I remember it, but now things are different. Spittlebugs (true bugs: Order Hemiptera, Family Cercopidae) or froghoppers (as the adults are called) are interesting insects for any number of reasons. One of the primary is, of course, the protective envelope of bubbles that the nymphs generate around them as they feed. That’s cool, even if you aren’t a kid, but once you know that the bug anus is intimately involved, one is apt to get a bit skittish (NB – always wash your hands after playing with spittlebugs). Adult fastidiousness aside, the most likely spittlebug one is apt to encounter is two things you don’t want in a garden bug: polyphagous and exotic. Another way to say this is ‘an alien that eats everything’.

Summer before this, we had quite the explosion of just such a spitting machine in the Home Bug Garden: Meadow Spittlebugs (Philaenus spumarius). Bellflowers, globe flowers, Queen-of-the-Prairie, goldenrod, aster, yarrow, and many other cherished garden gems had hunks of spit sitting just below the flower buds – wilting the buds and terminating the flowers. Hundreds of soapy squirts and weeks of spit and green ocher stained finger tips later, the spit population appeared undiminished. It was enough to drive a knee-jerk environmentalist to the evils of synthetic insecticides – if only such a synthetic chemical alternative were available! Alas a history of insecticide abuse, and the inability of government to favour science over fervour, has left the home gardener with little to do other than pray for parasitoids. Unfortunately, spit and parasitoids don’t seem to mix.

Not that I am entirely the innocent victim in this outbreak. I suspect the main reason for our spit-drenched garden was that I left most of my perennial plant stems standing over winter. I could claim that I did this for aesthetic reasons (winter interest), horticultural reasons (plant tops trap snow and help plants to overwinter), or just plain knee-jerk environmentalism (it is natural for plant tops to last over the winter and cutting them down would be unnatural and wrong). Truth be told, being a lazy bugger (aka ‘overworked’) conspired with all of the before to let the tops stand. Unfortunately, it is inside the stems of perennial plants that the froghopper secrete their eggs – the eggs that turn into spit and dead flowers the next Spring.

This last year I cut down and composted my perennial tops before Spring had sprung. Leaving them up most of the winter looked good and trapped snow, and cutting them down before it got warm seems to have kept the spittlebugs down to squishable levels. Other insect pests and diseases also overwinter in plant tops, so ‘better late than never’ applies here. The only downside to this approach is that fewer spittlebugs means even fewer froghoppers – and the Meadow ‘Froghopper’ is a really interesting animal, if only because it looks like dozens of different species.

Bugguide Net has a great poster displaying some of the diversity of colour morphs found in this single species and this posting displays a few of the variants found in the HBG. It is a bit disappointing that we have so few froghopper species (only two, including the unidentified spittlebug on our birch), but the Meadow Spittlebug is a good reminder of the pitfalls of using skin colour as a guide in life. No matter what the colour on the surface, a miscreant may lie below.

Biodiversity Gone Good: Our Friendly Wasps

Friendly?, well, I exaggerate a bit, but after the last posting on evil hornets, I thought I should exonerate all those wasps (Order Hymenoptera) that wouldn’t hurt us unless we really, really were asking for it. These are the so-called ‘solitary wasps’ – and in going it alone is their secret for getting along with us. Actually, I probably have that backwards: we tend to get along with solitary wasps because they can’t, and have no reason to,  gang up on us.

Like their freedom loving relatives, the ‘eusocial’ ('good', but actually bad, social) yellowjackets and hornets start out as solitary wasps each Spring when queens do all the normal wasp work themselves – find their own food, find a site for a nest, build the nest, lay the eggs, protect the nest, and feed their offspring until they are ready to pupate and become adults. Sounds all very noble and hard-working, but in reality queen yellowjackets and hornets aren’t adverse to stealing another queen’s nest and murdering the owner. In either case, the noble queen or insidious usurper rears grubs that develop into a worker cast – an army of so-called ‘non-reproductive’ or ‘sterile’ sisters (actually ‘suppressed’ would be a more accurate adjective, since workers may reproduce) that do all the work from then on and all the stinging.

These eusocial wasps have modifications in behaviour, chemicals, and stinging apparatus that have evolved to help defend large nests full of their sisters, half sisters (assuming their moms aren't monogamous), and drones. In fact, they have to defend that nest, since the chance of being able to found a new one is probably slim (and perhaps also the reason that stealing nests is common). Unfortunately, when they defend the nest against us, we suffer. Wasps that haven't become social, however, are much less aggressive. So, cheers for the solitary wasps!

Solitary wasps come in two forms: the hyperdiverse parasitic wasps (Ichneumonoidea and more) and the hunting wasps that are close relatives of the eusocial bees and wasps (and ants). Each female hunting wasp must build their nest(s) alone (males just dangle around), so the nests are small, and there is no other wasp to come to its aid if it is attacked. If fact, in spite of all the care and attention a hunting wasp mom will devote to rearing its offspring, it will never see them as adults and has no hope of recruiting them to defend a nest.

Thus, overly aggressive hunting wasps would tend to come to a bad end, but those with a more philosophical attitude, can move on, start another nest, and send daughters and sons into the next generation. That doesn’t mean they won’t put up a bit of a fight, many are capable of delivering a painful sting, but in general they aren’t going to slug it out with something as large as a human. It also helps that solitary wasps are only really interested in hunting down spiders or insects to feed their grubs and an occasional sip of nectar at a flower to keep them going. When a solitary wasp finds you at a picnic, it is most likely because you have attracted flies (which many take as prey) or you have put your blanket over their nest in the ground and they can’t find their way home. Some solitary wasps are members of the Vespidae, the home of hornets and yellowjackets, or close relatives like the mostly black spider hunting wasps in the Pompilidae, but most belong to other families.

When I was a kid and got to read excellent books like Wasp Farm by Howard Ensign Evans (sadly, now out of print - but try the library), the non-vespine hunting wasps all fit in one family, the Sphecidae. Now, alas, most of my bug reading is condemned to papers in scientific journals where any delight has been rigorously suppressed and the information is highly refined - like white sugar, but without the sweetness. Oh well, “Gracefully surrender the things of youth” and that includes a monolithic Sphecidae. The current hypothesis includes three families, and the one we definitely have in the Home Bug Garden, the Crabronidae are considered the sister group to the bees and only more distantly related to other hunting wasps. They do look a bit like bees, but go about their business stuffing flies, caterpillars, bark lice, or the like into their nests instead of pollen and honey. The Crabronidae has some giants, the Cicada Killer (Sphecius speciosus) being perhaps the most famous, but the largest I have seen in the HBG is about an inch long Bembix americana. This wasp nests in sand and feeds her grubs fly after paralyzed fly. I’m not sure what she was doing on a goldenrod in a yard surrounded by oppressive clay soils as far as the eye can see – but she now sits on a pin in a museum. I don’t have any pictures, but my friend The Bug Whisperer has an excellent shot of another, more fortunate, B. americana feeding at an aster.

Most solitary wasps, however, limit their parental care to choosing a host and ovipositing an egg. No nests are involved. These parasitic, or better, parasitoid wasps have no nest to defend, and their egg laying organ, the ovipositor (i.e. egg placer), is used to lay eggs in or on their prey, not to sting annoying humans. 'Parasitoid' is preferred in scientific circles because the end result is almost always a dead bug (whereas a parasite is happier when you keep on living – think head louse). Check out the aphid mummy above perving the mating Ancistrocerus parietum – it may look like an aphid, but it is just a hollow shell with a parasitoid wasp grub inside, undoubtedly a tiny member of the Ichneumonoidea (Ichneumonidae, Braconidae). Although I find hunting wasps more interesting,  it is the parasitoids that make up most of the - unidentified - species diversity of wasps in the HBG.

As far as we are concerned, parasitoid wasps are usually entirely good, except they are difficult to identify and their prey can expect a gruesome end – being eaten alive. That, however, is the fate of the prey of all wasps, including the paralyzed prey of hunting wasps or the mashed up prey of the social vespids. Well, if you want to nitpick, I guess hornets just cut-up insects alive, sort of like Dexter, and then feed the mashed bits to their grubs: nature ocher in sting and mandible. As long as the victim is an insect, though, do we really care?

Biodiversity Gone Bad: Hornets in the Home Bug Garden (updated 19 Sept 09)

Home bug gardening isn’t the most easily understood avocation. At work my colleagues make fun of me not wanting to kill the insects in my yard. My revolving neighbours on one side, a rental, persistently think that I am a botanist. No many how many times I tell them I’m a bug gardener, it just doesn’t compute. The neighbour on the other side has known me 7 years now and I thought she understood. But, when I proudly proclaimed to her last week that I had identified 9 species of hornets and yellowjackets from my backyard, she seemed nonplussed, or perhaps creeped-out.

Before someone goes running for the bylaws or the bug spray, let me make one thing perfectly clear: as far as I know, I don’t have any hornets or yellowjackets nesting in my yard. In fact, on the first cold night after finding a bald-faced hornet nest on the fence this Spring, I nuked it. The yellowjacket queen that tried to nest under the garage was first flooded, then buried and, those efforts proving entirely ineffectual, finally netted and smashed. There may be a nest hidden somewhere on my lot, but based on the trajectories of the visiting hornet workers, I’d say I have my neighbours to thank for my astonishing vespine diversity.

And an astonishing diversity it is – it looks like most of the hornet species likely to be found in this part of Alberta are lurking within flying distance of my backyard. Not only that, but they find the Home Bug Garden entirely worth a regular visit. This conviviality is no doubt due to two aspects of the garden: ready access to water and lots of umbels. Actually, there may be a corymb or a cyme or two, and there are certainly some corymb-like (yarrow) and otherwise racemose (goldenrod) clusters of composites that attract wasps, but as I repeatedly tell my neighbours in the rental, I’m really not a botanist. In any case, the umbels clearly get the most attention from simple umbels (milkweed) to compound umbels (dill, lovage, caraway, chervil). The good news is that most of the wasps fooling around on flowers are males – and these can not sting - and most of the ones that can are really more interested in bugs than in people.



Wasp is a general term, but for most people it refers to the social members of the family Vespidae that have the ability, and the willingness, to sting repeatedly when disturbed. This is mostly a behaviour of the workers – the reproductively suppressed females – who have no problem jabbing their modified egg-laying organ (ovipositor) into your skin and injecting lots of toxic and allergenic chemicals. Although it is possible to die of envenomization from wasp stings, almost every one who dies after being stung is a victim of anaphylactic shock and a single sting can kill a susceptible individual. Queens are much bigger than workers, and so more intimidating, but are usually only seen in early Spring and briefly in the Fall. Male wasps are harmless flower philanderers, but look pretty much the same as the workers (actually, they have longer antennae and one extra abdominal segment, but when you have a yellowjacket wanting to share your pop, these aren’t the easiest characters to see). So generally, keeping safe means keeping away from nests and from foraging workers.



The family name Vespidae comes from Vespa, the Latin for wasp, and also the genus name for the Giant European Hornet – a truly large wasp, large enough to feed on honeybees and yellowjackets when it feels like it, pretty intimidating in person, and also having the garden-unfriendly habit of girdling twigs so that it can feed on sap. Unfortunately, the European Hornet, Vespa crabro, was introduced to North America and is well established – but fortunately for Edmontonians, only in the East. Easterners also are well familiar with the paper wasps in the genus Polistes, but the only Albertan species, Polistes aurifer, appears to be limited to the south. That’s good, because Polistes nests are often placed on shrubs, fences, window wells, and other places you are likely to stick your hands without looking, and if you blunder into one, you will get covered by stinging wasps. What we Edmontonians get are Vespula (‘little wasp’) and Dolichovespula (long little wasp – they have a rather long face). Species of Dolichovespula tend to nest above ground in those grey football-like paper nests and species of Vespula tend to nest below ground in old rodent burrows or the like, but there lots of exceptions, especially when it comes to taking advantage of hollow spaces in human habitations.

Before I get into the specifics of my HBG wasps, let me highly recommend these two publications (from which I will borrow information freely):
Identification Atlas of the Vespidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata) of the northeastern Nearctic region by Matthias Buck, Steve Marshall, and David Cheung in the Canadian Journal for Arthropod Identification
The Yellowjackets of America North of Mexico. by RD Akre, A Greene, JF MacDonald, PJ Landolt, and HG Davis. 1981. Agriculture Handbook, 552. United States Department of Agriculture, Science and Education Administration, Washington D.C. 102 pp.

UPDATED 19 September 2009: Large V's of gruking sandhill cranes have been flying south over the Home Bug Garden; orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers and white-throated sparrows have been splashing around the bird bath; and the leaves are yellowing fast. Yellowjacket season will soon be over, perhaps next week, as frost is threatening. Time to polish up this post and bid adieu to some of our least loved bugs.

No new species to add to the HBG, but Insects of Alberta has records for the Arctic Yellowjacket (Dolichovespula norwegica (Fab., 1781) ) from Calgary, so I'm a bit envious. From the picture, I'd say that 'yellowjacket' is a bit of a misnomer - looks like a blackjacket to me - but nothern populations of vespids (including the solitary species) can tend towards 'ivory' markings.

To continue with the lack of good news, I have been able to confirm that the Evil European Wasp, Vespula germanica, is a member of the HBG vespifauna. The confirmation comes via the male genitalia (no pun intended, or at least not initially), so breeding populations are here in Edmonton. Excess confirmation for this colonization event came the very same day as the HBG event, when a nest was nuked at work and turned out to be V. germanica.

On the good, or at least interesting, news side, I have discovered (more likely rediscovered) a behavioural difference between the males of Dolichovespula and vulgaris-group Vespula. The former are the flower philaderers: greedy, flower frolicking, poseurs in aposematic bands.   The latter, at least for V. pensylvanica and germanica, are very mysterious delvers into the foliage of forget-me-nots - and seem not at all interested in flowers. Details are added below by species.



The Bald-faced Hornet - Dolichovespula maculata (Linnaeus)

These are our largest hornets, the only common black and white ones, and have a definite sense of entitlement. If you try to swat one away, it is more likely to buzz you, than to acknowledge your superiority and move on. They have attitude, but after a few minutes of in-your-face fancy flying, usually find better things to do. The workers take honeydew and other sugary things like pop, but mostly prey on live arthropods (especially flies visiting flowers in my garden) and sometimes preferentially on other hornet species. I watched one bald-faced wrestle another to the ground. I suppose I should have waited to see who won and what happened to the loser, but I was so shocked by the lack of sisterly solicitude that I stepped on both on them. Why can’t wasps just learn to get along? Anyway, the big, grey nests can be found up to 20m above ground in trees but also in or on human structures and in hollow trees. If you come across a nest, I advise you to leave it alone. Let someone else win the Darwin Award.

The Aerial Yellowjacket - Dolichovespula arenaria (Fabricius)

These are about half the size of the bald-faced hornets, and the more typical yellow and black in colour (see plate a few paragraphs above), but otherwise have similar behaviours. Nests are usually in shrubs or trees from near the ground to high in the canopy or in or around our homes. Workers are mostly interested in catching other insects for dinner, so they aren’t the worst guests at a picnic, but like any social wasp, if you disturb their nest, you are in for a bad time. The males are a constant presence on goldenrod and swamp milkweed throughout the late summer.

Northern Aerial Yellowjacket - Dolichovespula norvegicoides (Sladen)

This is my second favourite backyard wasp, mostly because workers are rare and inoffensive and the rest are harmless males feeding at flowers. Also, little is known about their biology except they tend to have aerial nests in trees and shrubs. Rare and mysterious is always more interesting than common and nasty. Males are common on swamp milkweed and early goldenrod in mid-August, but seem to disappear in September.




The Parasitic Blackjacket - Dolichovespula adulterina (du Buysson)

This is by far my favourite backyard hornet because it is the only obligate social parasite in its genus in North America (adulterina is now considered the proper name for the arctica in the USDA book). ‘Obligate social parasite’ means a queen D. adulterina infiltrates a nest of the Aerial Yellowjacket early in the season before the workers emerge, sneaks in its own eggs, and eventually kills off the yellowjacket queen. Now what more could you ask for in a hornet? Additionally, the males are an attractive ivory and black colour and pretty much mind their own business as they pollinate my plants.




The Blackjacket - Vespula consobrina (de Saussure)

Species of Vespula in our region fall into two species groups: the annoying vulgaris group and the laid-back and innocuous rufa-group. The Blackjacket and the next species, the Prairie Yellowjacket, are the only members of the rufa-group I’ve found in my yard to date. The Blackjacket looks a bit like a half-pint Bald-faced Hornet or a Parasitic Blackjacket but has a short face and slight differences in patterning. Like the rest of the rufa-group, these hornets are primarily interested in eating insects and aren’t likely to bother you. Actually, they have never bothered me, but I did kill a worker to confirm the species identification (and alleviate the snickering at work).

The Prairie Yellowjacket - Vespula atropilosa (Sladen)

This is the rarest of my backyard hornets and I don’t have any pictures. Edmonton is near the NE limit of its range. They nest mostly in rodent burrows or in rotting stumps and logs and have an interesting ichneumonid parasitoid, Sphecophaga vesparum burra (Cresson), that lives in its nests and parasitizes its pupae. In Washington State, 80% of Prairie Yellowjacket nests may be infested with the ichneumonid (which also goes after vulgaris-group wasps). Males wander into the HBG on a regular basis, but are difficult to document because they don't seem to have either the flower philandering or forget-me-not delving behaviours of the others. The few I have captured have been on-the-wing or resting on foliage.



The Western Yellowjacket - Vespula pensylvanica (de Saussure)

This is the main pest yellowjacket in my yard and probably in most of Edmonton, although we are near the northern limit of its range (apparently de Saussure had problems with his spelling as well as his distributional information since this wasp does not occur in Pennsylvania). The workers are aggressive, and although they do forage for insects, they also are attracted to dead animals including that burger, hotdog, or roast pig you are trying to eat at a barbie. They like soft drinks too (but seem to give wine a pass) and when you swat them away, they give you the buzz treatment. Nests are built in hollow walls and attics, as well as underground (probably what was trying to nest under my garage this Spring). They have a truly incredible parasitoid – the trigonalid wasp Bareogonalos canadensis (Harrington) – but that is a story for another post. The primary source of Western Yellowjacket mortality in my yard appears to be me, so there are lots of them buzzing my flowers for prey and my barbecue for meat.

Male Western Yellowjackets show an interesting behaviour in the HBG: they seem to like the foliage of forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica). Actually, the foliage is a low and dense garden bed composed of forget-me-not, coltsfoot (Petasites palmatus), and bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), but the males are mostly landing on the forget-me-not (but that is most of the cover).

Once they land, the males crawl into the foliage and disappear. I've put my nose to the ground and watched a couple and they don't seem to do anything other than walk on the plants and perhaps apply their mouthparts to the leaf surface now and then. What is going on? I haven't a clue, but there is no sign of honeydew, queen yellowjackets, or any other obvious attractant, including prey (which presumably they aren't interested in anyway).

I missed these males for a long time, because I assumed they were workers, but nope, they are all males - and none are showing up on flowers. Very interesting - and this is also were I picked up a male V. germanica, so it may be a vulgaris-group behaviour. My current favourite hypothesis is that the males are collecting a plant compound that makes them attractive to females, but it took two glasses of wine for that idea to pop up, so in my current sober state I find it dubious.

The Vulgar Yellowjacket - Vespula vulgaris (Linnaeus)

In its European incarnation, this is the species that gives its name to the nasty vulgaris-group. Ours may actually be a different species, but it has all of the unfortunate behaviours that result in yellowjackets being unwanted guests. Workers go after a wide variety of human foods and kill the occasional bug when they are bored. Nests are usually subterranean but are sometimes also built in rotten logs or stumps, forest duff, hollow walls or even in trees. This is one of the two species of yellowjackets that have been introduced to Australia and New Zealand where they have become an ecological disaster and very annoying pests. In my yard Vulgar Yellowjackets were common earlier in the year, but have now been almost entirely replaced by Western YellowJackets and the next species.

The Evil European Wasp - Vespula germanica (Fabricius)

This species is the horror introduced into New Zealand early on; Hobart, Tasmania in 1958; Maryland, USA in 1968; around Melbourne, Victoria in 1977; and elsewhere around the World on various dates in its unending drive to conquer all. It does well it urban areas, seems to like to eat all the things we like to take on picnic, scarfs up all the sweets it can, and is very aggressive in taking its share of the meal. Nest are usually subterranean but are also built in hollow walls, in roofs, attics, and any other place where it can find an acceptable cavity. The species looks similar to the Western Yellowjacket and especially so here where the Western colour pattern can overlap that of the European Wasp. So far, I’ve collect three probable germanica workers in my yard, but it would be nice to catch a male and confirm that this wasp has indeed reached Edmonton and that we aren’t just seeing a melanistic form of the Western Yellowjacket. Or would it? Well, whatever would be nice, unfortunately I have collected a male, and the genitalia never lie. Males, or make that the one male I have collected, have a similar forget-me-not behaviour to the Western Yellowjacket (see above).