24 July 2012 - Days of '47 -- Days of Bees

Today is Pioneer Day. Here in Utah, July 24 is a bigger holiday than the 4th of July.  Parades. Rodeos. Pow-wows.  Marathons. Fireworks. All to commemorate the moment when Brigham Young and the first group of Mormon pioneers looked out across the valley and Young said, "This is the place."

During the Days of '47 there are three parades-- the massive parade on the 24th, a children's parade a week earlier, and my personal favorite--the horse parade which has  400 or more horses including drill teams, the Arabian club with the riders in great costumes, shetland ponies pulling tiny stage coaches. You will see horses of every breed, color and size from miniature horses only 20 inches tall to the giant Belgians and Clydesdales.

It is so much fun. Here is the Sheriff's Posse. Gotta love those palominos.




But for me, it is late July. And late July means we've hit mid-summer. Mid-summer has properties and charms all its own. The crickets have begun to sing at night. It is lovely to sit outside in the warm night and just listen to the songs. 

If you can actually isolate the sound of one cricket you can calculate what the temperature is because there is a relationship between how fast a cricket chirps and the ambient temperature.  All you need to do is count the number of cricket chirps in 15 seconds then add 37, that should give you a pretty good idea of what the temperature is.  

This cricket-temperature formula was discovered in 1898 by a scientist. It is now called Dolbear's Law after his work studying cricket chirps. He has three different formulas for the regular cricket, the snowy cricket and katydids.

The solitary bees get really busy in August. The leaf cutters are really fun to watch. There are at least two kinds here in the yard. The first one looks like a wasp. It cuts blades of grass and stuff them into holes. They prefer deep holes like the ends of hoses, or sprinklers. They will crawl back five or more inches into a hose and build long nests that are so solidly packed in, that you really have to work hard to get them out. In the middle of all this grass the wasp places food such as a paralyzed spider, or moth or lacewing. 

They lay a single egg, pack it in with more grass then never return to that spot. Here is a leafcutter carrying a lacewing. It is slightly out of focus. Before you sneer, I double dog dare you to get a picture of a wasp while it is flying.  Hard! The little white thing that looks like a grain of rice is the lacewing. The wasp is looking for the end of the hose. 

The other kind of leaf cutter takes little bites out of the edges of leaves. The leaves end up looking like someone went at them with pinking shears. These bees make long tubes out of the little disks of leaves, and lay an egg inside. 

One of the amazing thing about these bees is that it only takes them 20 to 30 seconds to cut a little disk out of the leaf edge. The bee makes a food pack of pollen that is stuffed into the leafy tubes they lay the egg in, so the newly hatched baby has food when it emerges. 

You can make nests for these bees by drilling holes in a piece of wood or by bundling up cut up pieces of last year's bamboo canes. You can even buy them, ready made. These bees are great pollenators so I plan to get some houses ready. 

I also have red butt bees! They are one of the smallest in the bumblebee family and boy, are they cute.  According to the research I did on these they really are referred to as red butt bees.

The problem is there are quite a few different scientific names, bombus xxx and I'm not sure which one this is. More to learn.