Aculeata Agnoistes: The Prairie Yellowjacket Vespula atropilosa

In general, I try to adorn this blog with as many of my wife’s pictures as possible. After all, she is the photographer (and the one with the cumbersome and expensive camera gear). I’m strictly the put-a-name-on-the-bug person. And when it comes to cameras, I’m strictly a point-and-shoot person. As a result, I rarely come up with an insect picture that is of much use. This isn’t entirely the camera’s fault – people like Terry Thormin and an earlier Ted MacRae (who has now moved on to a real camera and even more spectacular photos) have produced numerous great insect photos with point-and-shoots (and Alex Wild can even produce good pictures with a cell phone) – but for anything that isn’t large and slow-moving, putting me and a point-and-shoot (originally a CoolPix 5700 and now a Lumix DMC-FZ28) after them is mostly a lesson in humility. To me the worst affliction of point-and-shoot insect photography is the interminable delay between pressing the button and the camera snapping the picture.

In this case, a colony of the Prairie Yellowjacket Vespula atropilosa under the steps in the garden in front of Government House, my wife was not around and I had to be the photographer. I won’t share the two dozen beautifully focused pictures of the wasp-less steps with you. Still, with enough persistence and cooperative bugs, even I can acquire images adequate to document the identity of an insect. Usually I would use the Identification Atlas of the Vespidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata) of the northeastern Nearctic region to identify a yellowjacket. However, as is true of so much of Canadian life, the Atlas only works for species in the East. The Prairie Yellowjacket is a western species and reaches its northeastern distributional limit in Edmonton: it isn’t in the key.

If you used the Atlas more or less correctly, you should end up in the rufa species-group before your started to founder. The two yellow spots on top the first abdominal segment are helpful – if mostly fused to the posterior yellow band. If you made some wrong choices, you might end up in the vulgaris species-group and start to feel like I do when using my point-shoot to take a picture of an insect. When the characters on your insect and those in the key start to diverge widely, it is usually a sign that somewhere you have made a wrong choice.

Learning the true name of a yellowjacket may seem like a bit of an egghead thing, but if you were trying to decide if you needed to eliminate the nest, it could be quite useful. In general, rufa group yellowjackets mind their own business and spend their time hunting insects to feed their brood. That means you could consider them useful ‘natural enemies’. If you stir up the nest, yes they will attack and sting you (so will bumblebees), but otherwise you might hardly notice them and probably most of what they eat wouldn’t be missed.

Vulgaris group species, however, will both hunt and scavenge and are quite willing to share whatever you are trying to eat or drink – and if you object, they are happy to sting you. They also have larger colonies and tend to be more aggressive. Every spring I eliminate any vulgaris group species trying to take up residence in my yard. This usually means the Western Yellojacket Vespula pensylvanica (it gets just east enough to be in the Atlas). I also take out the Baldfaced Hornets Dolichovespula maculata. In contrast to species of Vespula that tend to nest underground, Dolichovespula tend to nest in trees and shrubs (or on fences) where you are more likely to bump into them. The Baldfaced Hornet is the largest and most aggressive member of its genus and it pays to go after the nests when they are small.

Like other members of its hunting group, the Prairie Yellowjacket tends to nest underground and to have smaller nests than vulgaris group species – a few hundred rather than a few thousand workers. Unfortunately, although “restricted to the Canadian and Transition Zones of the Boreal Region”*, the Prairie Yellowjacket is also happy with the open areas we create such as golf courses and parks, so even if you mind your own business you may encounter this wasp. You can learn a fair amount about it – and even have a good chance of keying it out correctly – if you consult Akre et al. (1981)*, one of those great monographs that the USDA used to produce. You can also find most of the information and illustrations from this book on line at Discover Life. I suppose I might regret it, but if a Prairie Yellowjacket decided to nest under my steps, I think I’d let it.

*Akre, R.D., A. Greene, J.F. MacDonald, P.J. Landholt, and H.G. Davis. (1981). Yellowjackets of North America, North of Mexico. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. Handbook #552.

Aculeata Agonistes: Ants, Aphids & Aspen

The Home Bug Garden doesn’t look like the picture above, that is of our Moose Pasture about 55 km to the East as the raven flies, but it may once have. Both are located in the Aspen Parkland biome, named for its dominant tree, Quaking Aspen (aka White Poplar) Populus tremuloides, and its park-like mixture of open grasslands and patches of trees. In the Prairie Provinces of Canada, Aspen Parkland is rich in postglacial water bodies. And, as my late father-in-law pointed out repeatedly, he used to going boating in what is now our neighbourhood when he was a boy.

The prairie parklands occur across a broad stretch of central Canada, but aspen parkland also extends well to the south in the Rockies. South Park in Colorado, made famous by the potty-mouthed cartoon, is just one of many such mixtures of aspen and meadow. Interestingly, parkland is considered a transitional biome between prairie and boreal forest. It’s as if it isn’t really a natural system, but somehow aberrantly refuses to become its destiny: conifer forest if moisture remains high enough and fire frequency low enough or prairie if the opposites occur.

We love aspen, but whenever I find a seedling growing in the HBG, I grub it out. This is an entirely practical behaviour: aspen roots have a reputation for seeking out and clogging water and sewage pipes. Unfortunately, that means we miss out on a lovely tree and all but a passing acquaintance with many of the insects associated with aspen. Not all though, there appears to be at least one aspen-associated aculeate hymenopteron that finds both the Moose Pasture and our yard agreeable: the Black Mound Ant Formica podzolica Francoeur, 1973.

In zoological nomenclature, the year that comes after the author of a species name refers to when the diagnosis of a new species was first published. In this case, I haven’t inverted the 9 and 7 – this species name wasn’t properly sorted out until 1973. Before that it travelled under several names including the widely distributed Formica fusca. Insects tend to be interesting in direct proportion to how much one can learn about them and unless one can first learn their real name, such information as to make them interesting neighbours remains elusive. Ant species are particularly difficult to identify – species level keys are technical, and, well, many ant species tend to look alike. This seems to be especially true of Formica species. In this case, we are indebted to James Glasier for identifying the black ants that caught our attention with their herds of speckled aphids on young aspen as Formica podzolica (misattributions in any other images are mine).

Although the scientific name may be relatively new, people in my neighbourhood have been at war with black mound ants since soon after the first expanses of green lawns rose out of the former slough. Formica podzolica excavates and piles up largish mounds of black clay wherever it feels at home here and no one seems to find lumpy lawns attractive or interesting. In the bush, though, the mounds are an interesting feature and the black ants seem much less aggressive than their red and black neighbours Formica aserva.

I’m less than excited by ants, but no lover of lawns, so generally I leave my ants alone as long as they leave me alone. Unfortunately, ants are infamous for guarding patches of sap-sucking homopterons (aphids, hoppers, and the like). They protect these annoying insects from ‘natural enemies’ such as ladybird beetles, lacewings, and small parasitic wasps. ‘Natural enemy’ is another of those bizarre concepts that has somehow become commonplace. Are there unnatural enemies? Well, I suppose Count Dracula’s cockroach-munching Igor would do. In any case, usually ‘natural enemy’ refers to an arthropod that eats or parasitizes an arthropod that eats something we value. Ants can be natural enemies, but not when they are guarding aphids. By chasing off or killing things that want to eat aphids, ants allow plant lice (= aphids) numbers to rise, the amount of sap they drink to increase, more honeydew to spatter, and sooty molds to cover leaf surfaces. None of this would seem to be good for the plant, but the ants benefit by ‘milking’ the aphids for their honeydew and the aphids are assumed to do better with the guards.

Two things especially intrigued us about the black ants and their aphids on the young aspens, and the first was that the aspen leaves have a pair of nectaries (red spots where the petiole joins the leaf under the leg of the top ant). That plants can produce nectar in flowers to attract pollinators is well known, but nectar-producing glands are not limited to flowers. As a group (and giving an indication that scientists were once surprised to find this out themselves) nectaries not in flowers are called ‘extrafloral’. Ants are known to be attracted to extrafloral nectaries, and one can imagine that having aggressive black ants scuttling around one’s peony buds could be a good thing when some hungry caterpillar was on the prowl for a meal. But why would aspen want ants on their leaves if they end up tending aphids? This particular aphid is a well known pest of aspen – the Poplar Leaf Aphid (aka Speckled Poplar Aphid) Chaitophorus populicola (thanks to Bryan Brunet for the id).

Fossils in the Florissant beds in Colorado demonstrate that members of the genus Populus have had nectaries and been associated with ants and other predatory insects for at least 35 million years (Pemberton 1992. American Journal of Botany 79:1242-1246). Just why aspen have extrafloral nectaries, however, isn’t very clear since they do not seem to influence natural enemy abundance (see Wooly et al. 2007. Annals of Botany 100: 1337–1346). Of course, just calling an insect a natural enemy doesn’t make it useful to a plant (or a gardener). Ambush bugs and crab spiders, for example, make their livings hiding in flowers and eating pollinators.

So perhaps we have good natural enemies that help the plant and get their reward at extrafloral nectaries and other bludgers that just take a sip and go about their not very helpful lives. Life, however, is usually not that simple. For example, the usefulness of extrafloral nectaries may vary with age (younger aspen have proportionately more nectaries than older aspen) and time of year (many nectaries are known to dry up after young leaves have hardened off in early summer). So, ants may be useful for keeping caterpillars away in the spring or on young trees (which have fewer leaves they can afford to lose). Perhaps the ants don’t start farming aphids until after the trees cut off their supply of nectar. Perhaps later in the summer, when leaves will soon be dropping anyway, aspen find it less expensive to let the ants get their sugary rewards second hand from the plant lice than to feed them directly from extrafloral nectaries. There are enough ‘perhapses’ in this simple system to keep a host of scientists busy for years.

Speaking of which, Kailen Mooney & coworkers have found out something interesting about our black ant on pine trees in Colorado. There Formica podzolica herds large aphids in the genus Cinara. I once had a job dissecting Cinara aphids and looking for parasites – 10,000 aphids yielded only 3 parasites, so perhaps our black ant is a good Cinara shepherd (or I was a really bad aphid vivisectionist). However, Mooney found that birds were able to eat both ants and aphids, reducing the latter by 91% (those not eaten dropped to the ground) and causing the ant to look for less dangerous meals. That was good for the pine trees, so birds can be elevated to ‘natural enemies’ here. Black Mound Ants were good for the aphids only when birds weren’t around. But as usual, the story is even more complicated. As well as Black Mound Ants, another species in the same genus, Formica planipilis, also guarded pine aphids. This ant was a better aphid husbander even when birds were around (see Mooney & Mandel 2010. Oikos 119: 874–882 and references therein). I’m starting to feel a little bit sorry for the aphids that Black Mound Ants decide to protect.

This feeling is reinforced by a closer look at our erstwhile aphid farmer: several predatory hoverfly larvae are eating aphids right under the noses of the ants! Apparently the ants are oblivious to the foxes in the hen coop, or perhaps too nervous that a Yellow Warbler may swoop down and eat them to notice. Also, they may be being fooled by the hoverfly larva into thinking the maggots are aphids.  Syrphus ribesii uses its cuticular hydrocarbons to smell/taste like the wooly alder aphid and protect themselves from guarding ants (Lohman et al. 2006. Ecological Entomology 31: 41–51) and this may very well be happening here.

If you can think of being tended by ants as a characteristic of an aphid species, then you could ask the question, we’ll I wonder how many times it evolved in Chaitophorus aphids feeding on poplars and willows? Shingleton & Stern (2003. Molecular Molecular phylogenetic evidence for multiple gains or losses of ant mutualism within the aphid genus Chaitophorus. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 26: 26–35) asked this very question and found that it appears to either have been acquired by several aphids independently or to be a fairly unstable character that has been lost multiple times. Considering this particular association and the results of Mooney and her coworkers, one wonders just how beneficial it is for an aphid to be associated with the Black Mound Ant?

Aculeata Agonistes: Vespula alascensis, vulgar no longer

Ever wish you knew what that bee buzzing your flower was properly called? Or that hornet that won’t let you relax in the garden? Or that sleek black and yellow waspy thing on the goldenrod? Does it needle you when an aculeate hymenopter zips through your garden leaving you none the wiser? Of course, as Lewis Carroll’s Gnat sagely noted, knowing the names of insects is little use if they won’t answer to them. But that is so very B.G.: if we know a name, we can make Google talk for them.

So herein I begin a new series of posts wherein I will struggle to learn the names and natural histories of the stinging wasps, bees, and ants (Aculeata) that may frequent the Home Bug Garden. I think I’ve learned my lesson from alliterative day-of-the-week ‘regular’ posts. Rarely do Wildflower Wednesdays occur even near mid-week nor Sawfly Sundays on the Sabbath. Starting these series, however, has forced me to do lots of rewarding research that I would otherwise have put off for that mythical day when I have some free time. So this new struggle, Aculeata Agonistes, initiated on a Wildflower Wednesday a Sawfly Sunday another dreary Monday, will appear when the Muses and Chronos are in agreement.

 And what better way to start such a series than with a wasp where no one knew its proper name? That is the case with what was until recently the Common Yellow Jacket, Vespula vulgaris, described by Linnaeus from Europe in 1758 and reported from North America 79 years later. Or so most everyone thought until James Carpenter at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Travis Glare from Lincoln University in New Zealand unraveled the true relationships – and more importantly to us - the true name. As taxonomic stories go, this one is pretty exciting: full of names, invasive species, and even consequences of Mrs O’Leary’s famous cow. All of this is available free on-line from Carpenter & Glare’s paper (see below), but I will quote a few sentences that gives the species name to which our not so common yellowjacket should answer: “Bequaert (1932) also listed Vespa alascensis Packard, 1870, described from ‘‘Lower Yukon,’’ as a synonym of Vespula vulgaris. Packard (1870) is an obscure publication indeed, because most of the copies of the publication were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.”

You may have noted that my picture of Vespula (now the correct genus) alascensis is a bit blurry. That is because it was taken with my point-and-shoot not long after I got it and before I had any idea what I was doing (the wasp, however, is licking honeydew). All of the decent pictures that my wife or I had managed to capture of what we thought was Vespula vulgaris, for example, the picture at the head of this post, turned out on closer inspection to be the Common Aerial Yellowjacket Dolichovespula arenaria. The break in the middle of the yellow band on the first abdominal tergite is a good character for this species in dorsal view. And so the struggle with the Aculeata begins with a repeat of the lesson from the last post: it helps to know what characters are important before you start taking pictures.

Carpenter & Glare 2010 Misidentification of Vespula alascensis as V. vulgaris

in North America (Hymenoptera: Vespidae; Vespinae). AMERICAN MUSEUM NOVITATES 3690 http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/6074

Sawfly Sunday: On the Importance of Prolegs

As well as the three pairs of jointed legs on their thoraces, some immature insects have additional grasping/ambulatory organs on their abdomens called prolegs. In this case ‘pro-‘ seems to be used in its ‘before in time’ mode. Perhaps whoever coined this term in the early 1800s thought these fleshy lobes were the precursors of true legs, as some think of the lobopods in modern velvet worms. On the other hand, the OED states ‘prop-leg’ as an alternative, so perhaps proleg results from an elision. In any case, the number of pairs of fleshy abdominal prolegs is a good character for distinguishing those butterfly and moth caterpillars that feed on the surfaces of plants from those of sawflies.

There are exceptions, but a good general rule is that the caterpillars of butterflies, skippers, and moths (Lepidoptera) usually have 2- 5 pairs of prolegs. A typical arrangement is on abdominal segments 3, 4, 5, 6, and then at the end (anal proleg). Inchworms (Geometridae) are, perhaps, the most commonly noticed variant – all but the last two pairs of prolegs are absent, possibly atrophied after an ancestor took up measuring its stride. 

Then there are the strange Prominents (Notodontidae) where the anal claspers have become a kind of tail. And then the miners and burrowers that may loose all trace of prolegs.

 In contrast, most sawfly caterpillars with prolegs have them on abdominal segments 2-7 or 8 and retain the anal claspers. The rarely seen larvae of Mecoptera, the scorpionflies, may have prolegs on segments 1-8. Thus, if one can count and has a reasonable guess as to which folds of abdominal skin makes a segment, then one can usually tell an eruciform (eruca is Latin for caterpillar) larval lepidopteron or mecopteron from a sawfly without any special entomological experience.

Of course, to count the number of prolegs it helps to see them. This is a special problem in a picture and a good example of why it helps to have an idea of what the important identification characters are before one takes a picture. If you have the disk space, it is also an excuse to hold on to those poorly framed or out-of-focus shots that may have useful information for identification.

 The picture above is of a sawfly caterpillar – I know it from the shape of the head capsule and the general Gestalt (I was an entomologist for many years and some of it still sticks with me) - but how many prolegs does it have? At BugGuide, Dave Smith points out that most of the grass-feeding sawflies in North America belong to one of two genera: Dolerus and Pachynematus. Larvae of the former have an asymmetrical labrum and prolegs on segment-8; the latter have a symmetrical labrum and no prolegs on segment-8. Alas, neither the labrum nor the prolegs are visible and this id is stuck at my doleful level of Gestalt.

Wildflower Wednesday: Nodding Onion

With Autumn bearing down upon us and two near frosts (0.5 C or 33 F) in the Home Bug Garden already, the thoughts of all optimistic Zone 3 gardeners turn to Spring. Well, really, one should be filling one’s basement with the famous Alberta green tomatoes first, but it is best to have one’s bulbs in the ground here as soon as possible and before the end of September for sure. Thus, another tardy Wildflower Wednesday is given impetus as I watch the frost on the garage roof dissipate in the weak Sunday sun.

 Although Alberta's current native flora can boast of about a dozen species that form true bulbs (essentially a buried bud composed of thick leaf and stem tissue), many of these are restricted to the extreme southwestern part of the Province. Most Albertan orchids, irises, and members of the Lily family (in the old sense) tend to overwinter as fat roots or rhizomes. The most spectacular exception is the Western Wood Lily (Lilium philadelphicum) that seems to do well everywhere except the prairie and the far north. One would think from the name that the Venus’ Slipper Orchid (Calypso bulbosa), a circumboreal inhabitant of coniferous forests, would also qualify, but leaf tissues seem to be missing from the ‘bulb’, so it is more likely a corm. Perhaps less spectacular are two species of Death Camas (Zigadenus elegans, venenosus) that cast their pallid pall across southern Alberta and three of the four species of Albertan wild onions (Allium).

 More than one hundred species of wild onions currently make their homes in America north of Mexico, although several of these are recent colonists and even weeds, e.g. the invasive Eurasian Wild Garlic (Allium vineale). Alberta has only four species, all considered native: Geyer’s Onion (A. geyeri), restricted to the SW mountains, and the more widely distributed Wild Chives (A. schoenoprasum), Prairie Onion (A. textile), and Nodding Onion (A. cernuum). The Home Bug Garden can boast two of these species: Nodding Onion and Chives. Native plant purists might challenge us on the Chives – var. sibiricum being considered native and var. schoenoprasum the introduced culinary Eurasian variant. However, since some chives came with the house, we may have both. Actually, a purist might even challenge us on the Nodding Onion. Our plants came from a sunny south slope of a glacial knob on our Moose Pasture 75 km to the east. It is quite likely that a century ago pondweeds, sedges, and cattails were the HBG native flora.

 As wildflowers go, though, Nodding Onion (Zone 2, sun to part sun, average to dry soil) is quite an attractive and interesting one and fits in well with other garden plants, at least on the border. The plants produce a tuft of strap-like leaves (~2-3 dm [8-12”] long) with an oniony taste and smell in May and the leaves persist all summer. The umbels of pink flowers are unlike most onions in that they dangle – the flowers are all upside down – seemingly making things a bit more difficult for pollinators. 

Interestingly, a study of Nodding Onion pollination on the coast of British Columbia, Schuett & Vamosi (2010, Evol Biol 37: 19-28) found that flowering at the same time as another wild onion or another Alliaceae, a starflower (Brodiaea), resulted in a decrease in the “quantity and proportion of conspecific pollen” being delivered by pollinators to the stigmas of Nodding Onion. That suggests to me that Nodding Onion may be being different on purpose, perhaps to keep the attention of bees that can learn how to pollinate difficult flowers. Schuett & Vamosi were more interested in theory than the natural history of Nodding Onion, but do mention that species of Andrena and Bombus were seen visiting the flowers. Bumblebees are known to be able to learn pollination tricks, so that is consistent with my hypothesis. Verbeek & Boasson (1995, Can J Bot 73: 723-727), however, have another hypothesis: nodding flowers are dodging the rain. They note that nodders (shooting star, some lilies, trout lilies, fritillarias, and Nodding Onion) in coastal British Columbia tend to bloom early when there is more rain. This would not seem to hold in Alberta (especially not this year – with the wet and cool weather continuing throughout the summer and into today). The central Asian Honey Lilies (once Allium, then Nectaroscordum, but now back in Allium) also dangle and some research (e.g. Dubouzet & Shinoda 1998. Theor Appl Genet 97: 541-549) supports a close relationship to Nodding Onion, so perhaps they may one day shine some light on the cause(s) of nodding (other than overly long blog posts).

 Nodding one’s umbels of flowers is an interesting behaviour, but what happens after pollination is even more interesting: the umbels become erect, assume a typical Allium exploding firework pattern, and seem to grow a bit larger too. Verbeek & Boasson report post pollination stem elongation as a general pattern in their meadow plants and explain it as facilitating seed dispersal. This seems to make sense to me and the addition of an attractive seed head is always welcome in a garden plant. Another advantage of Nodding Onion is that takes well to Green Roofs. One can find Green Roofs in British Columbia – the one on Vancouver Island with the goats is one of my favourites – but what with the extremely steep pitch to the typical Alberta home roof, weight of snow, and the intense winter cold - I can’t see them in my future. In Michigan, however, Getter et al. (2009, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 8:269–281) found that Nodding Onion does very well on green roof plots with shallow soils (8-12 cm) and in sun or shade. So, perhaps some day I’ll get out the harness, ropes, and carabineers and start planting Nodding Onions on the roof. Not in the rain though. No matter how nice rain is for transplanting, this interminable rain of 2010 makes me want to stay indoors and away from slippery slopes and slugs.

Sunday Sawfly: A Dolerus deceptively not interested in a Mayday

The middle of the week is about as far from Sunday as one can get, but last Sunday I was overworked and this Sunday I’m on holiday, so I’m serving two Sundays with one small black sawfly. Dave Smith has identified this as a species of Dolerus (a genus with almost 200 described species, including about 75 in the Nearctic) and possibly the introduced European species D. nitens Zaddach. Dave doesn’t have records of this sawfly from Alberta, but it is sawing its way across North America, so was bound to get here sooner or later. This picture was taken on a Mayday bud in the process of opening in early May – what passes for early spring most years in Alberta. Dolerus nitens is known to be one of the very early emerging sawflies, but it does not feed on Mayday (Prunus padus) or other cherries or plums.


With its somber black colour, it is tempting to think that Dolerus comes from the Latin for sorrows (dolor), but ‘doler’ is Greek for ‘deceptive’. The genus was named by Panzer, presumably the famous German botanist and entomologist Georg Wolfgang Franz Panzer who died in 1829. Perhaps he was referring to something deceptive about the larvae. The caterpillar-like larvae of D. nitens graze on grasses (Poaceae) and sedges and their relatives (Cyperaceae) and are considered pests in grains. The Home Bug Garden has a few clumps of ornamental reed grasses (Calamagrostis), one clump of a native needle-grass (formerly in Stipa), and a pond-full of spike-rush (Eleocharis) and sedge (Carex). Species of all of these genera are suitable hosts for D. nitens, so we may one day be able to be decode the deceptive name.

I’ll end this short post with an even shorter digression, stumbled upon while searching (with little success) for some biological information on D. nitens. It seems that sawflies are one of those interesting entomological groups that are more diverse in the cooler parts of the World (or at least of its northern half) and become less diverse as one moves towards the tropics*, reversing what one normally expects of insect diversity. I suppose that helps to explain why the Home Bug Garden seems so blest with sawflies, while in Queensland I can't even remember seeing one.
*Kouki et al. 1994. Reversed latitudinal gradient in species richness of sawflies. Ann. Zool. Fenn. 31: 83-88.

Wildflower Wednesday: Tickseeds & Beggarticks

'Wildflower’ is an interesting concept. One might think that it refers to a plant version of ‘wild beast’, but the connotations barely overlap. If a wildflower really did go wild, then I would soon weed it out. Thus, cultivating ‘wildflowers’ in a garden creates a certain level of cognitive dissonance. The pedant in me wonders if I should look for another name for this series of posts? But I think not, for as William Cullina states in his book Wildflowers (see sidebar) about this week’s offering: “Tickseeds are indispensible wildflowers for the sunny garden.”

Only one of the 33 species of North American tickseeds (Asteraceae: Coreopsis) is currently found growing wild in Alberta: Golden Tickseed – Coreopsis tinctoria. I don’t grow it in my garden because I’ve never come across it. I’ve tried a related native annual, Nodding Beggartick Bidens cernua, but it didn’t establish, and besides, the local wild beggarticks support large populations of the chyromelid beetle Calligrapha californica corepsivora. As pretty as the beetle is, I’d prefer that this beast stay in the wild.

The Home Bug Garden does have tickseeds, but only those that are perennial, not quite native, and dubiously wild. Given a few more millennia of postglacial thaw, several of these North American plants may have gotten to Alberta on their own, but for now they need to be transplanted or seeded. Flying Saucers - Coreopsis grandiflora ‘Walcorep’ - was my first tickseed. Although it ‘naturally’ occurs as far north as Maine and Wisconsin, my plant failed to survive its first Alberta winter. Sad, because the flowers could be envisioned as giant yellow flying saucers and made a spectacular display.

In contrast, and although only rated to Zone 4, Threadleaf Tickseed Coreopsis verticillata has done well in my Zone 3 garden. The wildflower is found in dry woods and clearings in the southeastern US (perhaps driven there by the glaciers). ‘Golden Showers’ is tallish (1 m) variety with bright golden ray flowers and has survived three years of part-sun and cold, cold winters, blooming from mid-summer to frost. ‘Moonbeam’ is a dwarfish variety (1-2 ft.) with pale lemon ray flowers. It is nearing the end of its second summer in the HBG and it is a delightful flower. The Perennial Plant Association named Moonbean 'Plant of the Year' in 1992, but I don’t think I can call this a sterile hybrid a wildflower. Treating a horticultural variety as a ‘wildflower’ stretches the concept to the breaking point, so lets not.

But all is not lost - my final tickseed should more or less count as a wildflower: Lance-leaved or Sand Tickseed - Coreopsis lanceolata. It is native to Canada, or at least Ontario and British Columbia, and my plants derive from seeds from open-pollinated plants at the nearby Devonian Botanical Garden. The seeds germinated readily last year, but all I got was a basal clump of leaves. The leaves are evergreen even in this climate and so added a little colour to the early spring. This year the flowering stalks went a metre and a half (~5 feet) and added to a nice composition of native (e.g. Helianthus maxmilliani, Rudbeckia hirta) and near native composite ‘wildflowers’ (Echinacea purpurea, Heliopsis helianthoides, Liatris spicata) in the front woodland garden.

Although bees and other pollinators come to Lance-leaved Tickseed flowers, some recent research has called attention to the plant’s usefulness in attracting insect natural enemies*. ‘Natural enemies’ in this case was rather loosely defined as any arthropod that eats or parasitizes another arthropod, so predators and parasites of pollinators counted as much as those that eat crop pests. Still, planting strips of native ‘wildflowers’ around your crops probably would contribute towards maintaining arthropod biodiversity. Companion planting of ‘wildflowers’, however, continues to erode away at the concept.

Coreopsis comes from the Greek for ‘like a bedbug’. Presumably Linnaeus thought the seeds looked like some bugs with which he was familiar, but when I was collecting tickseed seeds earlier, a Minute Pirate Bug tumbled out of the seedhead. According to Fiedler & Landis (2007) Lance-leaved Tickseed seems especially attractive to Minute Pirate Bugs (Anthocoridae: Orius) which tend to feed on small pests such as aphids, thrips, and spider mites. Anthocoridae (‘flower bugs’) also have a habit of biting people and are thought to have shared a common ancestor with bedbugs, so perhaps Linnaeus was having another of his amazing insights. Personally, I can’t see the similarity of tick-seed (both Old English words) to either bedbugs or ticks, but perhaps I’m looking at the wrong species.

*A. K. Fiedler and D. A. Landis 2007. Attractiveness of Michigan Native Plants to Arthropod Natural Enemies and Herbivores. Environ. Entomol. 36(4): 751-765.