Sunday Sawfly: Inspired by Thrifty Thursday

 One of the benefits of the long, long days around the Summer Solstice at a northern latitude such as Edmonton's is that even when the weather is miserable most of the day, a hour or two of sunshine may peak through the clouds. That may not happen this rainy Saturday, but it did during yesterday's downpours and the cool conditions were a good time to get close to some bugs. Below is the original (reduced in size for posting) image of one such shot and above my best attempt at making it interesting. The sawfly is possibly Pristiphora appendiculata (Hartig)(=rufipes Lepeletier) - the Small Gooseberry Sawfly which my wife caught ovipositing for a previous posting.

I'm not much of a bug photographer - just an upper mid-range point-and-shoot (Lumix DMZ FZ28) documentor of the Home Bug Garden. The good pictures you see here are usually from my wife's Nikon D-70 DSRL - old, but reliable body with an even older lens (60 mm AF MicroNikkor 1:2.8) and SB-21 Speedlight flash. However, one of the web's best photographers of arthropods, Myrmecos, has started a weekly series called Thrifty Thursdays on using under $500 equipment to take interesting photos of insects. This has made me feel that I should be doing a better job and this is my first attempt to deal with the cluttered background problem highlighted in the linked post. Below is what I think is a less successful effort, but for some reason I like the clutter in the upper right - makes the fly seem to be seeking shelter in the pansy from the messiness of the world.

 

Oh well, it's down to a drizzle for the moment. Time to climb the ladder and clear the gutters of those nasty sticky spruce bud caps.

New to the HBG: The Living & the Dead Psilid

 

 Another rainy Sunday and another attempt to boost my rate of posting: meet the New to the Home Bug Garden series. Unlike, or rather exactly like, my ‘weekly’ series (Sunday Sawfly, Wednesday Wildflower, Aculeata Agonistes, Bumbling with Bombus, Australian of the Week), New to the HBG will appear only when I have the time, energy, pictures, and story to post. The only real difference is that this series will not be aimed at any particular taxon or cultural view, but at organisms that have recently shown up, been identified, or finally correctly identified.

 The first in this series is a mystery fly that first showed up on 6 June 2009. Well, my wife captured quite a nice picture of the fly on that date anyway. The funny looking head and way the wings bent over the abdomen seemed like they were distinctive enough that we should be able to learn its secret name. We were pretty sure it was an acalyptrate Diptera, but there are far too many flies, even acalypterate ones. Our searching of the web and pestering of Dipterists led to no higher level of knowledge. So, one rainy Sunday, the picture was assigned to the Miscellaneous Diptera folder.

 And that is where it sat until one sunny afternoon last week when I noticed this strange-looking bent-wing fly perching on the leaves of the Juliet Cherry and Red Currant. And that is when I did what we should have done two years ago – if you want to know the name of an insect, you need to collect a specimen and key it out or find a specialist to do it for you (read the caveat in the sidebar: HBG Names & Claims). Specialists are few and far between, but there is an increasing treasure of entomological resources on the web. First and foremost if you live in North America and have a fly, is the Manual of Nearctic Diptera (MND) – an Agriculture and Agri-food Canada Entomological Monograph that is now freely available as a pdf download from the Entomological Society of Canada website (and as reasonably priced print-on-demand volumes here).

 The MND is a tremendous achievement and one wishes that similar volumes were available for each insect order. However, it is highly technical and contains only brief overviews of each family, pictures mostly of bits and pieces, and dichotomous keys to the genus level. To use a dichotomous key, you have to make a series of choices correctly: one mistake and you are buggered. In the case of this fly, I was flummoxed and had to ask for help from our friend Jason. From the pictures, he suggested a likely family: Psilidae (not to be confused with Psyllidae a family of sucking bugs). I had skipped over this couplet in the key because the mystery fly didn’t look like other flies in the families that I knew of, e.g. the Carrot Rust Fly formerly Psila but now Chamaepsila rosae (Fabricius, 1794). Duh! With Jason’s help, the MND, and my dead fly on a pin, I was able to identify the genus: Chyliza Fallén.

 With the genus known and BugGuide, I was able to make a guess at the species, but how would I know it wasn’t another species in the genus? Enter the specialist, Matthias Buck – he said. ‘well, you need to check Melander 1920’. Melander’s paper came out in Psyche, the journal of the Cambridge Entomological Club. A few years ago this is where I would have ground to a halt, because tracking down a paper almost 100 years old in an obscure British bug journal would have been more than the effort was worth. Fortunately, the publishers of Psyche have made this journal both Open Access – anyone with an internet connection can download the papers – and have gone to the trouble of scanning in their entire backlog from 1874 to the most recent issue.

 So, finally we come to the end of our search, the secrete name: Chyliza leguminicola Melander, 1920. Not only did Melander describe this species, but he included what seems to be all that is known about its biology: “... L. P. Rockwood, who has swept this fly from the lupine, Lupinus polyphyllus Lindl., at Forest Grove, Ore., toward the end of April. He has also found puparia attached to the lower part cf this plant during July, from which adults emerged the following March ...”*. And what should be growing under the cherry and currants – lupines! 

 Since psilid flies seem to feed on plants as larvae, I suppose our C. legumnicola might count as a pest. But we long ago stopped planting lupines – they come up on their own and seem to be doing fine even with the fly and the far more annoying Giant Lupine Aphid Macrosiphon albifrons Essig, 1911. I think we will welcome our Bent-winged Lupine Fly to the Home Bug Garden and pin no more.

*Melander, AL (1920) Synopsis of the dipterous family Psilidae. Psyche 27 (5): 91-101.

Dueling Fabricii: Two Views on Complex Lifecycles

It was 2C this wet and gray Saturday morning, and I guess I could have gotten away with not covering the tomatoes, tomatillos, cukes, etc. last night. It will be cold, wet work uncovering them, so I think I'll leave their rugs on a bit longer and enjoy my breakfast of warm coffee and cold radish. If you think that radishes for breakfast is peculiar, well that's what I thought when I first read about them being a common French breakfast item. I was wrong: crunchy, peppery radishes go well with coffee.

Alas, I don’t grow my own radishes anymore: I have to buy them at the grocery store. The reason is the Striped Flea Beetle Phyllotreta striolata (Fabricius, 1803). You can see one of these above discussing the weather with Black Cherry Aphids Myzus cerasi (Fabricius, 1775) above. Both originated in Eurasia, but have colonized much of the rest of the World. Both were named by the great Danish entomologist and student of Linnaeus, Johan ChristianFabricius. The aphid’s name first appeared in his Systema entomologiæ (1775) and the beetle originally in his Systema eleutheratorum (1801) as Crioceris vittata.

 Fabricius’ ‘System of the Beetles’ (available at Google Books) used Eleutherata for the order of beetles that we now call Coleoptera. I’m not sure why his named didn’t stick – the rules of nomenclature do not apply above the level of superfamily – but he was unlucky with his Crioceris vittata too – the species name was preoccupied and its replacement has wandered through several genera before settling in Phyllotreta. However, Fabricius was able to propose a replacement name in 1803, and so the correct name for the Striped Flea Beetle is Phyllotreta striolata (Fabricius, 1803) (not 1801, as in some references). (The parentheses around the author’s name indicate that the species originally resided in another genus.)

 Thanks to some interesting archeological work excavating a buried privy in Boston, we know that the Striped Flea Beetle has been falling into outhouses in North America at least since 1775 or so (Bain & LeSage 1998). Why are there so many in my backyard? Well, my guess is two-fold: polyphagy and monoculture. The Striped Flea Beetle feeds on a variety of plants in the mustard family (Brassicaceae aka Cruciferae) and so can take advantage of many weedy mustards and the numerous backyard crucifers: radish, turnip, cabbage and similar crops. Also, the Striped Flea Beetle is a major pest in canola in the cooler parts of Alberta (another flea beetle, Phyllotreta cruciferae (Goeze, 1777), is more important further south) (see Dosdall & Mason 2010). Yellow canola fields surround Edmonton in the summer. All of this adds up to a monstrous number of flea beetles.

 Adult flea beetles overwinter in the soil and emerge ravenous in the spring just as the first radish seedlings are germinating. The tiny radish seedlings – just a pair of cotyledons – don’t last long. In contrast, a horseradish that came with the HBG produces large leaves quickly from its perennial taproot and can tolerate a massive amount of damage from its host specialist flea beetle. If I can get the radishes past the cotyledon stage, then I have a hope, but I've failed too many times. I’m trialing turnips this year – planted late and so far not showing much of the typical shot-hole damage. Flea beetles have complex metamorphosis: their grubs live in the soil and feed on roots of the same plants during the summer. The grubs are not considered major pests and for crops like radish and turnip that are soon harvested, they would be trivial. So, if you can beat the adults, you can grow radishes. We will see about turnips.

 Strangely, the Black Cherry Aphid also likes crucifers. You would think that a cherry aphid would stick to cherries, but newly emerged cherry leaves and buds is only their spring food. Although aphids have gradual metamorphosis – their young look more or less like the adults as you can see from the heading picture – they often have a complex life cycle with various winged and apterous forms on two or more host plants. A small dictionary of jargony names been coined for these forms and hosts.

 I’m not a specialist in these bugs, but I’m guessing that the fat black aphids are the fundatrix forms. If so, each developed from a fertilized egg that overwintered on the cherry and are now producing live young parthenogenetically (a long word for without sex). A fundatrix is not going anywhere, nor are her immediate offspring, so they don’t waste any energy producing wings (or males). During the summer, however, winged female aphids develop and disperse away from cherry and on to weedy crucifers or cleavers where they again crank out young without stopping to fool around. In late summer, winged males and females are produced, get it on, and eventually the females leave fertilized eggs on the cherry to spend the winter. This seems to me a complicated way to get from one year to the next, but perhaps all the natural enemies of aphids, the lady bird beetles, lacewings, hoverfly larvae, midge larvae, parasitoid wasps, hunting wasps, gardeners, and assorted diseases, make it worthwhile.

For more information on flea beetles and crucifers see:

Bain, A & LeSage, L (1998) A late seventeenth century occurrence of Phyllotreta striolata (Coleoptera : Chrysomelidae) in North America. Canadian Entomologist 130, 715-719.

Dosdall, Lloyd M. & Mason, Peter G. (2010) Key Pests and Parasitoids of Oilseed Rape or Canola in North America and the Importance of Parasitoids in Integrated Management. pp. 167-213 in Biocontrol-Based Integrated Management of Oilseed Rape Pests.

And for an interesting recent paper on the complex interactions between landscape factors, parasites and predators, ants, and Black Cherry Aphid see:

Stutz, S & Entling, MH (2011) Effects of the landscape context on aphid-ant-predator interactions on cherry trees. Biological Control 57, 37–43.

 

Return of the Police Car Moth (Wannabes)

 For those who remember last July's post on Fireweed that, among other pollinators, featured the Police Car Moth (Gnophaela vermiculata), I can now say that those flashing black & whites were doing more than just helping Fireweed to have a good time, but also indulging in some procreating of their own. The caterpillars already are fairly large and munch, munch, munching away on the Forget-Me-Nots (Myosotis sylvatica). 

 Forget-Me-Nots thrive in the HBG (they have naturalized in the yard), but the Siberian Bluebells (Mertensia sibirica) are only expanding gradually. Unfortunately more caterpillars have been showing up on the bluebells. So, we have been indulging in a bit of natural selection for host plant preference. 

 So far, no sign that the dear (if ephemeral) Siberian Bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost') or inexpensive but persistently attractive Bethlehem Sage (Pulmonaria saccharata ‘Roy Davidson’) have stimulated the caterpillars' tastebuds. But who knows, maybe the mother moths made the choices.

Death of a Mystery Plant

 Saturday 9 June 2007, like many a June weekend in the Home Bug Garden, was a day of planting, transplanting, weeding, and enjoying what sun, flowers, and bugs were in evidence before the usual afternoon clouds, thunder, and rain. Along the well shaded west side of the garage, I found something new and interesting – a tiny seedling with leaves with small, hairlike teeth on their margins. I was very excited because the leaves looked a lot like those of an Epimedium (variously known as Bishop’s Hat, Barrenwort, Fairy Wings, and Horny Goat Weed). In spite of the mostly off-putting common names, barrenworts are graceful plants with attractive foliage and pretty flowers. Moreover, barrenworts are reputed to do well in dry shade – the most difficult spot to fill with plants in any garden. The urge to splurge on epimedia at the local greenhouse was strong, but tempered by the high price, the usual Zone 5 rating (HBG is a Zone 3 garden), and a failed experiment with a West Coast native Redwood Insideout Flower (aka Redwood Ivy) Vancouveria planipetala. Like barrenworts, the insideout flowers belong to the barberry family, Berberidaceae, of which the Home Bug Garden was otherwise bereft.

 Well, what luck, both a new family (those bitten by the collector’s urge will understand this) and a possible dry shade tolerant groundcover! So, I immediately transplanted the frail seedling to the dry shade under the Colorado Blue Spruce in the front and have been babying it along ever since. Attempts to identify the mystery seedling were unsuccessful – even the University botanist would not venture a guess – and it looked like we would have to wait until it bloomed to discover its secret name.

 The seedling survived the winter of 2008 and by 2009 had formed a woody base and stem. This seemed to rule out barrenwort, because these have wiry stems. So, later in 2009, encouraged by the luck my fellow Edmonton gardener NorthernShade Gardening has had with her epimedia, I dropped a dollop of my disposable income at the local greenhouse and came home with a Epimedium grandiflorum 'Lilafee' and a Epimedium x warleyense 'Ellen Willmott'. Both were rated for Zone 4 by the optimistic greenhouse, but rather than risk them in the dry shade, I put them in my most protected and moist shade bed. Both barrenworts survived the Winter of 2010 and, although the leaves died off this winter, new sprouts are just coming up now. Meanwhile, the mystery plant kept slowing growing and was about half a metre high today with lots of ciliated leaves each with 2-3 sharp thorns at their base.

 Then Gardening Zone 3b posted on harbouring criminals. I was too busy enjoying the warm, partly cloudy weekend – perfect for planting out – to read blogs. But, good weather never lasts long in Edmonton, and Victoria Day dawned cool (+7 C), wet, and by noon had dropped to +4 (40 F) in the rain. Rather than dwelling on the chance of the temperature dropping a few degrees more and that damned white stuff returning to bury frozen tomato seedlings, I’ve caught up on my blog roll and have discovered that I have been nurturing a Prohibited Noxious Weed – Common Barberry (Berberis vulgaris). Although the leaves are poisonous, the berries are used to make jam in its native Afro-Eurasian range. Unfortunately for barberry aficionados, birds also like the berries and spread the shrub and barberry is an intermediate host of stem rust of wheat (Puccinia graminis). Alas, into the rain and watch out for the thorns.

 A sad end to what had started out as an exciting mystery, but I discovered another criminal lurking in the garden – Bighead Knapweed (Centaurea macrocephala). Also called Giant Knapweed, Armenian Basketflower, and Lemon Fluff Knapweed,

 Bighead is an impressive plant growing about 1.5 m (5 feet) tall and producing numerous bee and butterfly friendly yellow flower heads. It is not uncommon in Edmonton gardens, but Bighead may be new to the list. I grew mine from seed (‘Mystery Perennial Packet’) from what one would think was a reliable source.

 The original Bighead has now spread to a half dozen or so, some forming decent clumps. So, I can see it has the potential to spread and it probably belongs in the Rogue’s Gallery. Unfortunately, Bighead also has a big root and is a bother to grub out. A transplanting spade works better than a weeder.

 A total of 9 species of Centaurea Knapweeds (and Russian Knapweed Rhaponticum repens) are posted as Prohibited Noxious Weeds in Alberta (see the Zone 3b post) and 5 more are listed as Noxious Weeds by the USDA. None of these is Balkan Knapweed (Centaurea atropurpurea), a somewhat creepy plant in bud, but attractive to both people and bees in bloom.

 My first Balkan Knapweed came back from a visit to the Devonian Botanical Garden in 2005. It didn’t bloom until the third year, but now there are a dozen or so seedlings around the yard. I think I will err on the side of caution and grub them out too. I suppose this is a bit bigoted of me, but I'd rather not be the source of a new weed, no matter how attractive and bee-friendly.

 The difference between Prohibited and every day noxious weeds is that the populations of the former are still small and restricted and there is a chance of preventing them from spreading. To quote the AB Invasive Plant Identification Guide: "Plants in this category are either not currently found in Alberta or are found in few locations such that eradication could be possible. Under the Weed Control Act a person has a responsibility to destroy a prohibited noxious weed." Those Noxious Weeds not prohibited are probably here for good. As with the common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale F.H. Wigg. ssp. officinale), some day they may fall off the list and be just another interesting or annoying member of the flora.

Bumbling with Bombus: Queens & Cuckoos

 It seems to have jumped from winter to summer in the Home Bug Garden. We had three straight days of sun and +20 C temperatures in a row – unusual even in the summer. We may get three more, but the winds are so blustery that one has to hunker down to enjoy the sun. That seems to be true of the bees too: strong winds keep them low to the ground, but fortunately at this time of the year that is where most of the flowers are. The queens of the early emerging bumblebees spent the first few warm days search every nook and cranny for nest sites, but now have settled down to serious foraging.

Actually, this is most likely Bombus perplexus - perplexing indeed

 The queens of at least three species of bumble bee are braving the windy HBG at the moment, all members of the subgenus Pyrobombus. We talked about Bombus vagans perplexus, one of the black and yellow bumble bees, last year when first working out how to be sure we were looking at the apparently threatened Bombus  (Bombus) terricola. They featured in my first Bombus Cartoon. The other Pyrobombus, however, are yellow, orange, and black – and the queens of two of these are both early emerging and very similar in appearance: B. huntii and B. ternarius. I know that workers of both species foraged in the HBG last year – the workers are a bit easier to tell apart – but the only difference I can find between the queens is that in ternarius the black on the thorax extend posteriorly on the scutellum (see Bombus Cartoon Mark II below).

 As we all know, I’m a bit camera-challenged and the wind hasn’t helped a bit, but I’ll offer a couple of blurry Bombus ternarius pictures in support of the identification. At least one smaller queen with yellow followed by three abdominal stripes of orange also passed through – most likely Bombus centralis – but the wind carried her away faster than I could start up my point-and-shoot.

 Lots of smaller hairy bees have also been out and I believe they belong to the genus Andrena – a complex group with lots of species. Along with the Bombus queens, these bees clearly liked foraging at Coltsfoot (Petasites palmatus) and Siberian Squill (Scilla sibirica 'Spring Beauty'), and the Bombus also went after the Striped-Squill (Puschkinia scilloides 'libanotica') voraciously. Tulips, except Tulipa tarda, seem of little interest to the bees and the large Dutch crocus accounted for all but one or two of the crocus visits that I saw (and the smaller crocus out numbered the Dutch crocus by about 20:1). 

 So, I guess I’ll just have to consider the hybrid tulips, daffodils, and smaller crocuses for me and the rest for the bees. However, there was one bee at the squill and coltsfoot that I’m not so sure I was happy to see, although it represented a new HBG record – a species of Nomada. 

 These wasp-like bees are cuckoos – the females enter the nests of other bees, lay an egg, and their grub eats up all the host bee’s provisions (this is called cleptoparasitism – same root as in kleptomania). I suspect it is the Andrena that will be robbed (blurry below, better one here from a previous May).

For Madeleine in May

My niece Madeleine is attending her commencement exercises this weekend in Virginia and will be awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree. I'd hoped to have some nice pictures from the garden to post in her honour, but although we have jumped from winter right into summer weather over the last two weeks, the plants have been slow catching up and the last few days have been so windy that only blurs and blasted petals can be captured. Instead I'll post some of my favorite pictures that her aunt took on Vancouver Island over the Easter break. I'll start with two British Columbia natives: the fawn lily above (Erythronium revolutum), a native but doing well in Butchart Gardens, and the salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) endemic in a coastal rainforest patch below.

One native in a garden and one in a forest seems too balanced, so here are two English Daisies (Bellis perennis) from Butchart Gardens. In its escaped, naturalized form, English Daisy is often called by the less prosaic 'Lawndaisy', and for those that like their lawns a solid green or their parks to have only pre-European native plants, it is a noxious weed in both North America and Australia. It reverts to a simple white flower head with far fewer ray flowers in the wild and is very common in Victoria, BC. I still remember my disappointment on learning that the pretty white daisy wasn't native, but a weed in Victoria, Australia.

Well Madeleine I hope the thunderstorms hold off until after Commencement is over, that you have a grand day,  and that you do well by your BA. And, since no HBG post is complete without a bug, here's a mayfly subimago perched on my finger to wish you luck in your new life.