I used DE in my garden to control insects and deter slugs and snails. It works, but not very cost effective. DE for agricultural use are not that cheap! Maybe better use for art? The man who makes art from plankton | WIRED UK
Boric is especially good for cockroaches because they honor their dead by eating them. Means more soldiers get a taste. Ever notice that when you step on a cockroach, next morning it's gone? Yeah, that. == DE at the mine costs $7 per ton, supposedly. Salamander King is paying for supply chain it would seem. Attractive packaging. Somehow this reminds me of snails eating blue and red packaging of charcoal briquettes and trailing blue and red poops. do not know why.
LOL... Although I have never seen snail poop trails in color, I am sure they excrets what they can not digest down. As for the cost of DE, it is more like $7 per bag in local home center good for treatment of a few pots at a time but not cost effective for large garden.
Grizzly bears. Ursus arctos horibilis. Since post-glacial extinctions, toughest kid on the block in N. Amer. A young field biologist would dedicate her life to studying them. She may still, after recovering from getting her head bashed in. Or she may switch to black-footed ferrets; also fascinating but less grumpy. See gofundme page: This is not an advert, but her story is more fully told there than in media clickmes.
It always feels more personal when close to a familiar place. Checking local news, it appears that the likely trailhead from which she was working is less than a dozen air miles from my aunt and uncle living on the other side of the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. We xc skied towards the Wilderness just a few months ago, between elder care shifts. Uncle volunteers to me a handheld defensive tool, larger than anything I own, whenever we hike or ski out there. While grizzlies are nearby, they don't seem to come down to the human settlement. He is more concerned about (and the tool is sized more for) a large feline, of the sort that took out a mountain biker closer to here just last weekend: Victim killed in mountain lion attack near North Bend ID'd | KOMO This kitty appears to be a young male, just expelled from home and cast out to go find his own territory. Emaciated and hungry. Pathology report will take some time. Remember that old saw about running shoes to save yourself from bear attack? You don't need to outrun the bear, just your hiking partner? Doesn't work with wild kitties, their instinct is to chase running things. So the feline catches the faster runner, while the ursine gets the slower runner. The previous cat attack here, 22 years ago, was also a mountain biker, still riding. But he had been a recent high school wrestler, and bested the (also emaciated young) kitty. Then let it go. My brother and his friends have repeat experience with non-solo, non-emaciated kitties. While one draws and fearlessly holds attention, another silently closes in on a 180-degree different bearing. But overall, I'm vastly more concerned about motor vehicle traffic risk.
Eggs of some insects eaten by birds can survive gut passage, hatch, etc. News to me: The stick insects that survive being eaten by birds -- ScienceDaily
Water Buffalo (draft animals) around here are too similar in appearance to Cape Buffalo. I don't trust 'em.
How honey bees regulate brood temperature as an superorganism is just amazing. It was 87 degree today. My bees were bearding all over the hive boxes to cool down the brood inside.
Also, when Asian hornets attempt predation on bee nests, the latter swarm them and get really hot. Hornet dies. Some bees die. These are called baking balls or death balls. Asian hornets by themselves are pretty scary.
In hindsight, this shouldn't be surprising. Many plants depend on their "eggs" passing through a digestive track for dispersal.
This defensive behavior is observed only in native Japanese honey bees, Apis cerana japonica. Bees commonly used for honey production, European honeybees, Apis mellifera are defenseless against the hornet.
I've read that too. Not convinced. There is quite a bit of bee research here including on A. cerana. Including done by a fella I know with bee allergy. Saw him go mildly anaphylactic once after getting stung. Pretty poor career choice I'd say.
May have mentioned before that beekeepers (A. mellifera) with several nest boxes put a playing card on each. They claim that bees can recognize different patterns and so know which one is home. Seems easy to test, if one does not object to trolling bees.
A major research topic at my shop is fig and fig-wasp mutualism. Happened to see a clear exposition of this: botany - How does the mutualism of figs and wasps exactly work? - Biology Stack Exchange See the graphic. Wasps (at least males) have unusual lives; only as eggs are they ever alive outside fig fruit. Females' ovipositors are under study for micro-surgery applications. No one seems to understand yet how this structure can probe so delicately and accurately. These flowers are also amazing for being uniquely 'inside-out'. With apologies as required to fig-eating readers
I never heard of card trick bees play. Foraging bees orientate by visual cues from landscape and sun's location, but when they approach vicinity of their home hive, they use primarily sense of smell for hornining in. Once they orientate, their navigation system is quite good that they can easily distinguish their own hive from neighbor's hive set right next to it within 3 feet. They can reset this orientation if hive is moved further than 3 miles. Beekeepers uses this 3 feet/3 miles rule when relocating hives. I once had to relocate established hives from one location to another location within my backyard about 30 feet away. Problem was if I move the hive directly most of foraging bees will not come back to the new location. Loss of almost half of colony, and reduced honey. So, I had to move the hive out of my yard further than 3 miles, then set it their for a week, then bring it back to the new location in my backyard. Another method beekeepers use is to move a hive no more than a foot every night to a new location. Since this method would have taken me 30 days, and moving 90 lbs hive every night, I did not try that.
