Deleo delirium: Maleficia delenda sunt!

There comes a time in the course of a home bug gardener’s life when events call upon him to take up politically incorrect tools and use them to defend and preserve all he holds dear. Or to paraphrase Cato the Elder: Passer domesticus delendus est! I guess the exclamation point is un-Latin, but then so are periods, and my Latin muse assures me that the passive periphrastic agrees in gender and number with the object that ought to be destroyed. So, no matter what you think Cato said, don’t think delenda or delendum here, but 3rd declension masculine Passer, and IMHO, they all have to go.

Why, you might ask, would someone who claims to be gardening for biodiversity urge that a bird, the alpha and omega of biodiversity, ought to be destroyed? If you are a blue-birder or have a purple martin house, then I guess you already know the bloody murder that house sparrows (HOSP) wreak. If blood and bird bodies don’t bother you, examples of HOSP attacks can be found here. Remember - don't look if you can't stand the sight of bloody birds.

This morning we pulled a dead red-breasted nuthatch from the nest box where they have been relentlessly worried by the larger, alien, invasive, and thuggish HOSP. (I’m making no pretense at being a scientist this morning.) The opening to the box is (deliberately) too small for a house sparrow and all they can do is get their head in far enough to peck. They can’t possibly use the nest box, but being bird-brained, I don’t expect they care. And that’s not all! The bloody HOSPs ate my peas! AHHH! What is a bird introduced to eat insect pests doing eating my garden plants? Bloody bad biology is what. Shades of the cane toad, the HOSP eats few insects and feeds mostly on seeds and plants!

What to do? You probably need a permit to even look at a bird with murderous intent, let alone wring its neck. Ha! Unfortunately for the HOSP, in Alberta they are considered invasive pests, and the Province offers lots of permit-free advice on how to reduce their populations. Firing off shotguns within city limits and spreading poisons aren’t among the things one can do, but trapping is encouraged. Well, more or less. According to Chris Fisher & John Acorn’s “Birds of Alberta”, HOSPs arrived here in 1898 and “People with a dislike for this introduced ‘avian mouse’ go to amazing lengths to combat the species, but House Sparrows are here to stay.” And that certainly seems to be true – it’s hard to find a block in the City where you can’t hear their constant cheaping. It's enough to make you want to squeeze them until their eyes pop out.

And then there are all the other maleficent pests scourging the garden. Formica fusca delenda est! Based on the number of people in Edmonton who whiten the ant mounds in their lawns with boric acid, I suspect the opinion that the black ant must be destroyed is widely held. Since I have no truck with lawns, though, I’ve held them no animosity. After all, ants really are extraordinary superorganisms, industrious, and often fun to watch. These particular ants appear to belong to the Formica fusca group and they can mess up my tiny patches of lawn all they want – but if they want to hang out in my garden, then they’d better be polite. This year they have been extraordinarily rude and their tunneling has already killed a purple sage and a hens-and-chicks and severely damaged a shrub cinquefoil. I tried soaking them with the hose to encourage them to move to a drier site. That does work sometimes, but not this year – a shovel and Dr Doom were required. That made me feel bad, but not so bad when I started looking around at all the collusion between aphids and ants.

Leaf miners, caterpillars, sawflies, spittlebugs, they are all bad, but there are aphids on everything! Aphididae delendae sunt!

A Gallery of Aphid Destruction

I agree with Gardening Zone 3b – where are the ladybugs and lacewings when you need them?

The natural enemies are out there, but I guess they don't like the cold wet weather any more than we do. Slowly they are coming on.


To paraphrase Betty Davis, there comes a time in every gardener's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne. A couple hours with the squirt bottle of soapy water will have to come first though.

Beware the Lord of Flies: Behold the Antipollinator!

Although bees and wasps (excluding hornets) are all that is industrious and good in a Home Bug Garden, not every insect is as honest about its identity or intentions. This very waspy looking fly is a bad example.

Far from being a friendly wasp, this demon from the fires below is a killer of pollinators: a Thick-headed Fly (Diptera: Conopidae: Physocephala sp.). In his book Insects, their natural history and diversity, Steve Marshall refers to conopids and their relatives as ‘Killer acalyptrates’ and with unholy delight describes how “bumblebees visiting flowers on a sunny day” are attacked by these “dipterous divebombers”. These depraved dipterons attack bees and wasps in flight, not to feed on them directly, but to leave behind an egg that will hatch into a parasitic maggot that will eat them alive from the inside out. No wonder Beelzebub is called the Lord of the Flies!

Take the time to look at this imposter closely and its infernal flyness will jump out at you. Bees and wasps have two pairs of wings, but Di-ptera have only two functional wings. The rear wings are modified into organs called halteres that help them maintain their balance when executing the sharp turns that allow them to make food of bees in flight (or feed on our blood or deposit eggs where we don’t want to know). Then there is the fixed proboscis that looks rather like the stabbing mouth of a tsetse fly, rather than the flexible tongue of bees. Finally, there are the devil-like horns instead of the graceful multi-segmented antennae of bees and wasps.

If these flies were attacking the queens of the yellow jackets and bald-faced hornets that were so common this Spring, then I would cheer them on. Every dead queen hornet is one less hive and many dozens fewer hornets at the barbie. Alas, according to Marshall, species of Physocephala are known to be parasitoids (the technical term for an insect parasite that kills its host) of honeybees and bumblebees. Let’s be bunt – they hate your flowers, fruit, and vegetables. Isn’t that always the way? All the really interesting bugs that show up are doing things you’d really rather they didn’t and not doing the things that you’d like done.

Here’s another other example of a killer fly – one that looks much more like a fly. Well, let’s be fair – it’s a bloody good-looking bug. Steve Marshall refers to these sciomyzid flies as “Snail killers”. Rather than tormenting useful pollinators, their maggots devote their deplorable de gustibus to mollusks. Well and good if only they were attacking the introduced, alien, destructors in the genus Deroceras – the totally without merit and abominable European Garden Slug. Given the current (and much appreciated) relatively wet June, these buggers will be on the slime march.

Alas, this sciomyzid is most likely interested in the harmless, even useful, aquatic lymaeid snails (see Marshall p. 417) that help keep the algae in our pond more or less in control. Does Nature really care anything at all about its balance in my garden? Of course not! What a bloody stupid question to ask. Am I the only too credulous gardener? I wonder how the Obama vegetable garden is going – forget the lead, what about the bugs? If it turns out the Secret Service is doing some late night pesticide appilcations, I may have to have a rant. Oh, who am I kidding? My first true rant is almost written.

A Short Ode to Pollinators, mostly Bees

I’d like to second Gardening in Zone 3b’s salute to Bug Girl’s Blog for her excellent coverage of National Pollinator’s Week in that large country to our south and especially for her post on ‘Homes for Pollinators’. Devoted readers (reader?, late night insomniac?) may remember that I was lamenting my dearth of information on just that topic a few posts ago. Now I have a wealth of information to digest on how best to make the Home Bug Garden a better place for bees to nest.

Goodbye to old favourites, native and alien: Winter Kill 2008-9

Rain, glorious rain! Last night, unexpectedly, we got 11.28 mm (yes we have a digital rain gauge, so take the last digit on faith). That’s not even half an inch, but brings our HBG total to 26 mm (just over an inch) since Mayday. Looks like more is on the way too, so although that means our planned Sunday Moose Pasture hiking/canoeing is cancelled, I can plant out the last of the seedlings and catch up on blogging.

Last Fall was very dry, the Winter harsh, and the Spring non-existent. Although the snow cover this Spring was good, it came on late (no snow cover until mid- December) and from 13 December through 9 January every night-time temperature was between -10 and -35 C. The rest of the Winter and Spring experienced repeated bouts of extreme cold with -30 as late as 10 March, the last killing frost (-4) on 22 May (three weeks after the usual last frost date), and the last light frost on 9 June.

The harsh weather is no doubt responsible for the devastation of last Fall’s bulb blow-out (~380 new bulbs went in). Although the established and new crocus, squills, chionodoxa, muscari, and species tulips did well, and quite a few of the new hybrid tulips and daffodils survived and put on quite a display, many were frost blasted and there’s been no sign of others. No sign either of the new Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), Checkered Fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris), spendy Lilac Wonder Dog’s Tooth Violet (Erythronium denscanis 'Lilac Wonder') , Spanish Bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica), or Grecian Windflowers (Anemone blanda). Not much surprise with the last two – Zone 4-5 plants that have failed before - but the others were all Zone 3, well mulched, watered in, and should have survived (well, maybe not the Lilac Wonder – a bit floppy when they arrived and that is not a good sign with lily bulbs).

The few Alberta native bulbs that I have (Western Wood Lily Lilium philadelphicum, Nodding Onion Allium cernuum) don’t show themselves until late spring. They are just now in bud. None of the bulbous MIAs are ‘native’, so perhaps they just aren’t well adapted to this life. But the established ‘alien’ bulbs seemed to come through pretty well and without them, the HBG would have been pretty bleak this April and May.

The perennials were pretty badly winter whacked too, with 18 no-shows and 3 more that put up a leaf or two, but are on their last roots. Below I’ve divided them into North American Native or ‘Alien’ listed them with the year they went in and their putative USDA Zone rating. There is no obvious pattern by origin: mortality is about equally divided between exotic and North American natives, including 3 plants native to Alberta (a wild bergamot and two sunflowers).

R.I.P. North American Natives Winter 2008-9:
Doppleganger Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea ‘Doppleganger’ 2005 Zone 3
Purple Joe-Pye Weed, Eupatorium purpureum 2008 Zone 3
Wild Bergamot Monarda fistulosa 2003 Zone 3 (AB native)
Garden View Scarlet Bergamot, Monarda didyma ‘Garden View Scarlet’ 2005 Zone 3
Maxmillian Sunflower Helianthus maxmillianii x 2 2004 Zone 3 (AB native)
Sunset Strain' Bitteroot, Lewisia cotyledon 'Sunset Strain' 2008 Zone 4
Purple Leaf Coral Bell, Heuchera americana 'Purple Palace Select' 2005 Zone 4

On the ropes (a couple of leaves left):
Chocolate Mint Foamflower, Tiarella 'Mint Chocolate' 2006 Zone 3
Iron Butterfly Foamflower, Tiarella 'Iron Butterfly' 2007 Zone 3
Ruby Spice Summersweet, Clethra alnifolia 'Ruby Spice' 2007 Zone 4

‘Aliens’ lost this winter:
Fernleaf Yarrow, Achillea filipendulina ‘Cloth of Gold’ 2005 Zone 2
Giant Yarrow, Achillea grandiflora (or maybe Tanacetum macrophyllum) 2005 Zone ?
Monkshood, Aconitum napellus clump 2004 Zone 2
Yellow Loosestrife, Lysimachia punctata ‘Alexander’ x 2 2004 Zone 2
Bronze Garden Mum, Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Morden Delight' x 2 2006 Zone 3
Siberian Bugloss 'Jack Frost', Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost' 2008 Zone 3
Siberian Bugloss 'Spring Yellow', Brunnera macrophylla 'Spring Yellow' 2008 Zone 3
Chinese Lanterns, Physalis alkekengi franchetii 2008 Zone 2b

March 1, 2159 or Pollinators Not

This morning the clock in the train station claimed it was March 1, 2159. Well maybe it meant that is the earliest we can expect warm weather. In any case, it gives me an excuse to follow up the post on pollinators with one on pollinators not, and display a few more Bug Garden visitors.

Not every arthropod ones finds in a flower is searching for nectar or pollen. Lots of them are there for another kind of feed. That can be interesting, especially if you like predatory insects like the Damsel Bug above, or spiders:





Or it can be disconcerting if you are hoping for fruit or seeds. But the toll that predators take on pollinators is unlikely to be of much importance in yield. Much more insidious are those that have nothing but bad intentions.



I remember how pleasantly surprised I was, that first Bug Garden Spring, at the extraordinary diversity of of sawflies that were visiting flowers. Except for diprionids long ago when I was a forest entomologist, I can't say that I ever had much experience with that branch of the Hymenoptera and I was entranced. Well, now I know better and I've come to an accommodation with most. A few leaves here and there are a small price to pay. The ones that defoliate the currant, columbine, and creeping jenny, though, get a population reduction treatment. They are messy buggers to squish between the fingers, but that's life.






And there are a few of these non-pollinating flower-visitors that are just too attractive not to like, like the tephritid fly below. We have planted lots of goldenrod for the late-summer colour and pollinators, but we don't mind hosting a few gall flies too.

Gardening for Pollinators meets Lord of the Flies

Another week, another threatened frost: such is Spring in a Zone 3 Bug Garden. Oh well, I should stop whinging and just get on with it. The HBG was first envisioned as a home for pollinators, which I suppose we thought of as mainly bees and butterflies. Well, not really, since at one time or another we have both taught pollination ecology, but embryonic bug garden thoughts aren’t necessarily very deep and butterflies, bees, and flowers was the general idea.

Not that we wanted to see lots of honeybees (another Australian anti-alien bias), but with the spread of the varroa bee mite and the emergence of the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, our primary pollinator has been on the ropes for some time now. In Alberta, a harsh climate and marauding bears mean that the only honeybees you are likely to see come from well defended bee keeps. Apparently no one near us has a backyard hive, because Apis mellifera is a rare visitor. That is too bad if you like cherries, saskatoons, apples or other home-grown fruit and vegetables, but there are alternative pollinators that have been attracting attention now that the tried and true honeybee is on the wane. There’s even a web resource page devoted to ‘Alternative Pollinators’ and, although a very high proportion of its links are broken and the functioning links often lead to questionable sources of information, the list supports the assumption that bees + butterflies = alternate pollinators.

Alberta has ‘native’ bees that can hold their own against the climate. Bumblebees (Bombus), leafcutter bees (Megachile), sweat bees (Halictidae), and digger bees (Andrena) are all reasonably diverse here. Our goal was to make the HBG their home by providing a more or less continuous bloom, and to reap our payback in produce. In that, I think we can claim some success, but it is small. Bees need more than flowers, and in particular, they need nesting sites. We did think of this a bit, e.g. planting shrubs with hollow twigs, but the most important of the alternative bee pollinators here are ground nesters and rodent burrows and bare patches of untilled soil aren’t exactly extensive in the HBG. Most of these bees are solitary and having a few dozen nesting in your yard isn’t going to do much for spring flowering fruit, especially since the most efficient of these, the leafcutter and bumblebees, are mostly summer visitors.

Leafcutter bees are a bit of a mixed blessing, since they certainly live up to their name, but they more than pay back the linings of their nests with efficient pollination of most of the veggies in the garden. Unlike most pollinating bees, megachilids collect pollen on their long body hairs and not on special pockets on their hind legs.

Bumblebee colonies take a while to grow and there is a distinct hiatus around now when the first brood must be pupating and the queens taking a well deserved rest. Add to that yet another late, cold spring and the result is cherry trees covered in silent blooms.

Of course bees are not the only pollinators. A variety of other Hymenoptera (ants, sawflies, wasps), beetles, butterflies, and flies come to flowers – or at least to certain kinds of flowers. Spreading, open inflorescences like those found in the carrot family or composites can accommodate a high diversity of insects out for a good feed. Surprisingly, two-winged flies (Diptera) are perhaps the most abundant and diverse of these alternative pollinators. The flower or hover flies (Syrphidae) are perhaps the best known of these floral frequenters. In his "Insects - Their Natural History and Diversity" Steve Marshall says we should treat syrphids as "honorary butterflies" for their bright colours, expert acrobatics, and abundance in familiar environments. Such honours do seem to have been bestowed in the UK, where pocket guides to hoverflies are available and such giants in the pantheon of bug gardeners as Jennifer Owen have done much to document syrphid diversity and abundance in urban gardens. Alas, no such guides or documentation seem to be available here (John, are you listening?).

Many syrphids mimic hymenopterans with a sting such as hornets and bees, which no doubt makes hanging around flowers a bit safer. Beeflies (Bombyliidae) could be said to do the same and often have their mouthparts drawnout into elongate straws for sipping nectar in the deeper flowers. No such advantages in camouflage are apparent in what seem to me to be the creepiest of the dipterons that frequent flowers - blowflies (Calliphoridae), especially species of Lucilia (bottom two pictures in fly plate) that would seem more at home on carrion. Astilbe seems to be especially attractive to these flesh flies.

So if you just want flowers and happy pollinators, and don’t mind a preponderance of flies, think large, open inflorescences like astilbe, goldenrod, butterfly weed, yarrow, daisies, caraway, lovage, and the like. If, however, you want apples, cherries, saskatoons, currants, beans, peas, tomatoes, peppers and anything else that requires some skilled pollination, then you need bees, and bees need a home as well as food. I suppose it is well past time that I started learning what bumble and digger bees need to make a home.

Beetles up to no good: Natives & Not in the HBG

Last night a Frost Warning was in place for the International Airport, but the City Centre was predicting a safe 6C. Since the Home Bug Garden is about halfway in between these two weather stations, and sometimes closely follows one more than the other, out came the old towels, throws, and sheets. In any case, we came through with a low of +4C (39F), about midway between the 1 & 7C reported at the two airports this morning. Being intermediate is more or less ‘normal’ here, and the HBG once again benefited from an ‘unnatural’ modification of the climate, an Urban Heat Island Effect (although not as strong as I would have wished). My friend in Gardening Zone 3b lives nearer the City Center, as one can seen by the numerous beautiful blooms with which his garden has already been blessed.

The Home Bug Garden is getting there, though, and has a few beauties of its own. The Buffalo Currants (Ribes odoratum) and Golden Currents (Ribes aureum) are our alternative to forsythia (an iffy plant in this climate) – covered in attractive yellow blossoms in early spring and with the added delights of a clove-like fragrance and tasty black berries. Some people think these two very similar plants are the same species and the USDA database lists the former as a variety of the latter. There is a difference that some might think important, however; Buffalo Currant (Ribes aureum var villosum) is not considered ‘native’ to Alberta, although Golden Currant (Ribes aureum var aureum) is. UPDATE - Just checked our two forms and the picture was mislabelled - now corrected to Buffalo Currant, which seems to have brighter orange dots in the flower centre and long hairs on the leaf petiole (and hence, one assumes, villosum) that are absent in Golden Currant.

Cold or not, the currants, cherries, marsh marigolds, pasque flowers, and numerous bulbs are in full bloom. That should be good, since the HBG was started with pollinators in mind and stocked with lots of plants that would get them off to a good start in the Spring. Several years ago the HBG would have been abuzz in assorted bees, flies, wasps, and beetles flitting or crashing from flower to flower. Unfortunately, the last couple of Springs have been cold and treacherous and this year pollinators are few and far between: an Andrena or two, a couple of hoverflies and small wasps, and bumblebees – but only the few queens just starting their broods. One wasp of interest; however, was the small, hollow twig nesting moth-hunter Lestica producticollis, a new record for the HBG. Less welcome is yet another beetle, one that eats spruce.

Yet to make an appearance is a most attractive soft-winged flower beetle (Melyridae) called the Scarlet Malachite (Malachius aeneus): a spectacular little scarlet and metallic green beetle, often aggregating in open flowers (marsh marigolds, poppies) and dusted in golden pollen (the picture is from last year on a fleece flower spike). One would guess that any insect with a common name would have at least one striking feature and that goes double for one that makes a conservation list. Once “local but widespread” but now rare in England, the Scarlet Malachite has its own Biodiversity Action Plan. Here, of course, it is an alien invader, and as someone who has worked on ‘invasive species’, I tend to always assume the worst about any ‘alien’. I don’t know how this clear cultural bias inserted itself into my otherwise (in theory) ruthlessly scientific mind. It must have been too much exposure to bloody cane toads, lantana, bumblebees, hornets, foxes, hares, and assorted other neo-Australian miscreants. For example, when my wife pointed out an article (BBC Wildlife June 2009, p. 62) about an extinct UK bumblebee (Bombus subterraneus) being re- introduced from exotic populations in New Zealand, my first response was a snarl at the ‘threat’ the same population posed to Australia. Or does it? I think this problem deserves its own post or three, so for now I will just say that I hope the Scarlet Malachites are just late this year and not all frozen.

Meanwhile we have some interesting beetles showing up, most more or less native as far as I know, if ‘native’ means apparently living in Alberta before European people arrived (but not too much earlier unless they fed on ice). The willow (actually an exotic Golden Willow – Salix alba probably ‘Vitellina’) seems to be supporting an interesting array of ‘native’ chrysomelid beetles. According to Laurent Lesage, a specialist on leaf beetles at the Canadian National Collection, the Chrysomelidae has about 50,000 known species of which about 1% (566) are known to occur in Canada and Alaska. Several of these are introduced pests – like the all too common and diverse flea beetles – and some are someone else’s problem, like the striking 12-spotted asparagus beetle (we don’t grow asparagus, so we just enjoy the beetle as it passes through to wreck havoc on a neighbour). The ‘native’ willow beetles can do a fair amount of damage too, but not so much that the willow seems to suffer – it is growing far too well and putting on at least a metre a year.