Insect of the Week!

Wheel Bug: Arilus cristatus

The wheel bug is a member of the family: Reduviidae (assassin bugs). These are beneficial insects since they feed on soft bodied pest insects such as caterpillars. They stab prey with their proboscis to inject salivary fluid which dissolve soft tissues. It has been noted that while these insects generally avoid contact with people, they can give a painful bite if they are handled roughly.

These insects are easiest to spot during mid to late summer.

Bring Back the Pollinators!

The Xerces society is a group that is very active in insect conservation. Currently they are working to stop the observed decline in pollinators with thier "Bring Back the Pollinators" campaign. (Xerces: Bring Back the Pollinators website)

Whole Foods is also raising donations for the Xerces society called "Share the Buzz". The following Whole Foods Market vendor companies are raising funds as well:

Annie's
The Hain Celestial Group, Inc
Alba Botanica
Almond Breeze
Amy's Kitchen
Arrowhead Mills
Attune Foods
Avalon Organics
Blue Diamond
Earth's Best
Evian Natural Spring Water
GoGo squeeZ
Honest Tea
Honeydrop Beverages
Lake Champlain Chocolates
Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day
O.N.E. Coconut Water
Pacific Natural Foods
Popcorn Indiana
PROBAR
Sambazon
Small Planet Foods
Springfield Creamery/Nancy's Yogurt
Stonyfield
Terra
Three Twins Ice Cream
WestSoy
Wholesome Sweeteners
Yogi Tea

With 75% of our food relying on pollinators, it is important to continue working to improve habitats for important pollinators.

Who's pollinating the soybean?

What's Shawn doing tromping through that soybean field?

Collecting bee bowls!

We are sampling for bees in soybean fields in Wooster and Apple Creek, OH for a graduate student at Iowa State University.

Soybean plants can actually self pollinate to produce beans, but evidence has shown that the presence of bees can increase seed production.

Idenifying and Enhancing Natural Enemies in Vegetable Crops

This 30 minute video describes how to identify and enhance natural enemies, which are arthropods that feed on pest insects providing natural pest control. Much of it was filmed at the ALE lab at OARDC.

Just Chillin

This beautiful moth was found yesterday in the facilities services building on campus. It is a regal moth (Citheronia regalis), and I decided to put it outside on this tree to hang out before eager collectors stuck a pin in it!

These moths don't have much to do anyway. Once they are adults they don't eat a single thing, Find some friends to mate with, and die after a week or so. Best to spend your last few days relaxing!

Visit this blog to see some pics of the caterpillar, and more adults pics way better than mine:

http://livingglassart.blogspot.com/2011/09/ive-been-visited-by-royalty.html

Effects of the landscape on services provided by insects

The ALE lab is interested in how the surrounding landscape can affect populations of insects as well as services they provide such as biological control and pollination. An increase in the complexity of the landscape is often associated with an increase in the abundance of natural enemies (insects that prey on crop pests). Additionally, the abundance and diversity of bees visiting flowers has been observed to decrease as the amount of  semi-natural habitats decrease.

A simple landscape is often composed of more conventional crops such as corn and soybean:

A complex landscape tends to have more forest and vegetable crops:

To answer questions about the effect of the landscape on insects, we pick sites, which often consist of an agricultural field, or another area, where data was collected. We then drive around at a 1.5 or 3 km radius (1.5 km for biological control, and 3 km for pollination by bees) and document what is planted or what type of ground cover is present in every field within that circle.

 

Using a program called ArcGIS we create maps that can be used to compare with the data we collected at our sites with the composition of the landscape surrounding that site. We are currently in the data collection, and mapping phase for most of our projects. The ALE lab is looking forward to the data analysis phase so some of our questions can be answered!

Dog toy

Andrea and I were out in one of my pumpkin patches today collecting cucumber beetles and squash bugs. It was a beautiful day and my farmer's friendly chocolate labs came out to see what us weird humans were doing crouching around pumpkin plants. Somehow, I dropped my glasses...and the dogs got bored with watching us collect bugs. They might still work!