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Honeydew wars
Jan. 13th, 2014 08:55 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 6. High today: 7. So, uh, been a bit of weather around here since last report. Despite the temperature's having been above freezing for more than three straight days now, there's lots of ground still covered in solid ice. One year ago today it hit 15 at Pearson. Last Tuesday was probably the first day with a mean temperature below -20 at Pearson since 1994. Maybe it'll have been the last one ever, who knows.
Sometime in the late summer of 2012, I noticed that a little tree by the dock at the cottage had a whole lot of fuzzy white stuff on some of its branches, and this fuzzy white stuff had attracted the attention of a whole lot of ants and wasps. I had at least a couple of hypotheses as to what it was--some sort of fungus that the bugs were eating; some sort of eggs that the bugs were eating and/or guarding--but I never got around to trying to look it up. Last September, the same fuzzy white stuff appeared on another of the same kind of tree near the water. Again, this tree was crawling with wasps, although for some reason not so many ants.
Underneath this tree there is the rotting carcass of a floating deck my grandfather built. On one corner of the deck, these two bald-faced hornets would appear every afternoon, for weeks on end, as far as I could tell, patrolling around and around in circles,
sometimes stopping to give each other kisses.
Usually there was a paper wasp--I don't know whether always or usually the same one or not--wanting to fight for control of that corner of the deck.
As these pictures indicate, the paper wasps, despite being smaller, usually seemed to have the upper hand in these skirmishes. But they could never defeat the hornets--who would also never team up to fight the wasps, but would sometimes sit and watch the other one fighting--
and the fight would end with the hornets still patrolling, and the paper wasp looking to pick another fight, and so on and so on--except for the odd occasion on which a hornet would venture up into the tree, and battle would be joined up there.
A little while after I took all those pictures, I was amazed to discover that that white fuzzy stuff is actually masses of woolly alder aphids, those trees being alder trees. The aphids bury their heads in the wood, leaving their woolly white bodies waving in the wind, oozing honeydew onto the branches and dripping it onto whatever's below. I have to say that I was not entirely convinced that that was really what the fuzzy white stuff was, but I figured, if it is, then, presumably, lady bugs will come to eat the aphids. And so they did!
By the end of October, the fuzzy masses had come to look like this:
Incidentally, these are not the world's weirdest aphids; those would be these--boogie-woogie aphids!
Sometime in the late summer of 2012, I noticed that a little tree by the dock at the cottage had a whole lot of fuzzy white stuff on some of its branches, and this fuzzy white stuff had attracted the attention of a whole lot of ants and wasps. I had at least a couple of hypotheses as to what it was--some sort of fungus that the bugs were eating; some sort of eggs that the bugs were eating and/or guarding--but I never got around to trying to look it up. Last September, the same fuzzy white stuff appeared on another of the same kind of tree near the water. Again, this tree was crawling with wasps, although for some reason not so many ants.
Underneath this tree there is the rotting carcass of a floating deck my grandfather built. On one corner of the deck, these two bald-faced hornets would appear every afternoon, for weeks on end, as far as I could tell, patrolling around and around in circles,
sometimes stopping to give each other kisses.
Usually there was a paper wasp--I don't know whether always or usually the same one or not--wanting to fight for control of that corner of the deck.
As these pictures indicate, the paper wasps, despite being smaller, usually seemed to have the upper hand in these skirmishes. But they could never defeat the hornets--who would also never team up to fight the wasps, but would sometimes sit and watch the other one fighting--
and the fight would end with the hornets still patrolling, and the paper wasp looking to pick another fight, and so on and so on--except for the odd occasion on which a hornet would venture up into the tree, and battle would be joined up there.
A little while after I took all those pictures, I was amazed to discover that that white fuzzy stuff is actually masses of woolly alder aphids, those trees being alder trees. The aphids bury their heads in the wood, leaving their woolly white bodies waving in the wind, oozing honeydew onto the branches and dripping it onto whatever's below. I have to say that I was not entirely convinced that that was really what the fuzzy white stuff was, but I figured, if it is, then, presumably, lady bugs will come to eat the aphids. And so they did!
By the end of October, the fuzzy masses had come to look like this:
Incidentally, these are not the world's weirdest aphids; those would be these--boogie-woogie aphids!
