181 replies to this topic

[ANTdrew]

Update 3-23-2020

Spring had a false start last week as we shot up to record high 80 degree temps. I was hoping for flights to assuage my boredom, but I only found a bunch of Prenolepis males. The Crematogaster cerasi mega-colony that lives between the boards of my patio's retaining wall have activated again and were busy forming trails that spanned most of the length of my garden. Bee activity is ramping up as well. Bombus impatiens queens are foraging on the weeds in my freedom lawn and Xylocopa virginica carpenter ants are busy battling each other for territory and flying into my picture window. You can tell the Xylocopa males by the white patch on their foreheads. Osmia leafcutter bees are also starting to emerge from the cavity nests I have scattered throughout my yard. The males emerge first with females coming later to provision their nests.

I found the parent plant for the Zizia aurea seeds I collected and planted. It was starting to bloom in a tiny wooded park near my home. Zizia aurea has very shallow flowers that are perfect for tiny bees and wasps to gather nectar from. They also bloom at a key time for newly emerged pollinators, so I'm excited to add this to my native plant menagerie.



A couple of the first wildflowers have started to bloom. Wild geranium was the first native I added to my garden way back in 2011. This plant is indestructible, yet beautiful at the same time:



Claytonia virginica, or spring beauty, is a lovely spring ephemeral that completes its whole cycle of growth, flowering, and setting seed before deciduous trees leaf out. By mid-May the plants go dormant and disappear entirely. I had to wait four or five years for this plant to finally bloom:



Finally, though I came up empty handed searching for queens the other night, I did spot this cool creature, a Cope's Grey Treefrog!

Edited by ANTdrew, March 23 2020 - 10:36 AM.

[Canadant]

Awesome pics. I'm a little jelly. This is all my wife and I want for us and our two girls. A small home and a yard with a garden. I don't need to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. It's the small things that are important. Unfortunately since my return to canada its been hard to do a career change. I'm back to school and it's tough but these pics give me hope.

Thanks!

PS Nothing cuter than a nice big toad!!

Edited by Canadant, April 5 2020 - 3:39 PM.

[ANTdrew]

Thanks, brother! That means a lot to me. I will pray you get your patch of earth very soon.
I have a good update in the works!

[ANTdrew]

Update 4-7-2020

 "Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold" -Robert Frost. Early spring is probably the nicest time in my garden. Being cooped up at home has given me more time to enjoy and tinker in my yard this year, so I've been propagating a lot of things to share and replant areas of my yard that are being destroyed by our foundation repairs.

 

Carolina Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens) is in full bloom at the moment. I have this creeping vine growing up over a little archway. This vine is a bee magnet, but the nectar is apparently toxic to non-native honeybees. I don't ever see them on the plant, and my yard is planted for native insects primarily, so that doesn't bother me one bit. You can see a Melissodes longhorn bee in the photo above.

 

Redbuds (Cercis candensis) are also in full bloom. This spectacular tree is part of the legume family, and its flowers are a delicious addition to salads. Legume pollen is very important for new bumblebee queens as a high protein food for their first workers. This is the state tree of Oklahoma, and is only found in extreme southern Canada despite its name!

 

I took this photo of Claytonia virginica flowering at the patch where I gather seeds every year. I didn't notice the ant up top until I examined the photo closer a few days later. It's probably a nectar seeking Tapinoma sessile.

 

Finally I found a new reptile to add to my species list! This worm snake was in the my front lawn the other day. I think it got dug up by the foundation repairs. I haven't seen one of these in forever!

 

 

 

[Da_NewAntOnTheBlock]

wow, if only all the plant life (besides the grass) looked alive in my area like it does in yours...

[ANTdrew]

Just keep a positive latitude. Spring will come to the north soon.

[RushmoreAnts]

Lots of people have evergreens in their yards over here, so between them and the grass, it's green enough. 

[ANTdrew]

Update 4-13-2020

 

 My garden continues to be a good escape, but the whole front yard has been torn up by our foundation repairs. The few early blooming natives are drawing in lots of insects as they are basically the only show in town. Golden ragwort (Packera aurea) is one of the best insect plants this time of year. I think this plant is way underused in gardens! Most of the year it grows as an evergreen ground cover that would make an excellent native alternative to destructive invasives like English ivy. In spring, the plants send up 12" high flower spikes that are topped with fragrant yellow blossoms. The flower spikes become an insect metropolis as they get covered by aphids, aphid predators like ladybug and lacewing larvae, and aphid tending ants!

 

I've observed Camponotus, Lasius, and Tapinoma ants tending the aphids on my plants so far this year.

 

 

 

 

I'm also embarking on an ambitious plan to finally gather some more spring ephemeral seeds using seed traps. There are some nice patches of spring ephemerals in my local nature center, so last Friday I went and tied pieces of old pantyhose on the seed pods of plants like bloodroot, toothwort, and yellow trout lily. Gathering seeds from these plants is challenging because the leaves can disappear before seeds mature, and the seed pods can erupt suddenly scattering the seeds. Spring ephemerals seeds are important to native ants because they have elaisomes attached. These are fleshy protein packs that entice ants like Aphaenogaster to gather and distribute seeds in a brilliant dispersal strategy. I'm hoping that the panty hose catch seeds before they scatter, but I will still need to time it right to gather and plant seeds before the elaisome dries out!

 

Seed trap on bloodroot:

 

Seed trap on toothwort:

 

[RushmoreAnts]

No plants for us yet...... we just got 6 and a half inches of snow on Easter morning.  It's not unheard of, either.

[ANTdrew]

Dang, man. It’s been years since we had April snow.

[ANTdrew]

Update 5-11-2020

Spring has been cold and slow in coming here in Virginia. We woke up Saturday morning to ice in puddles on our patio, which is highly unusual for this late in the year! It did warm up nicely on the 4th, though, and my yard filled up with Camponotus alates, which I've documented in my Camponotus journal.

Bee activity continues to ramp up, and I am enjoying watching Bombus impatiens queens foraging. I've also started seeing the first tiny workers foraging mostly on my salvias. Here is a queen on my Salvia hybrids (non-native).



Osmia mason bees have been provisioning their nest tunnels, and I spotted a new species in my yard, Osmia lignaria. These are the native blue orchard mason bees, and I think they've started coming as my redbud trees have matured. Legume flowers are the favorites of these bees because the pollen is so full of protein.




Here is a Japanese horned bee, Osmia cornifrons, in a driftwood nest I made. This is the drab species I usually see:



I've continued my quest to add dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum) to my garden. The seedlings continue growing, but it has been very slow. Most of the seedlings were lost for some reason, but two are doing well.



I'm also trying vegetative propagation with this species. I dug up two pieces of this plant from an impressive stand of it growing in a roadside median near my house. This specific stand spreads more than 200 feet across! Using a spade, I dug up some root pieces with a few stems. These I planted in pots and put a clear plastic bag over the top to keep humidity high. This is an easy trick I've used for cuttings and divisions in the past. It's basically creating a mini-greenhouse. The ability of plants to regenerate like this is nothing short of a miracle to me.





Like I've said before, insects love this plant like no other, so I'm really eager to get some going.

Edited by ANTdrew, December 17 2020 - 5:50 PM.

[RushmoreAnts]

Spring has been cold and slow in coming here in Virginia. We woke up Saturday morning to ice in puddles on our patio, which is highly unusual for this late in the year! It did warm up nicely on the 4th

Wow- now you know what it's like to be a South Dakotan  (although even we usually doesn't get cold this late in the year either).

Edited by AntsDakota, May 11 2020 - 6:28 AM.

[ANTdrew]

Update 5-21-2020

 

 This is one of the coldest springs I can remember in over a decade. It has slowed the development of seeds, but I had a big break through this morning! After many, many years of dreaming, I finally have gathered the elusive seeds of Sanguinaria canadensis, aka bloodroot!

 

Inside one of my pantyhose seed traps, I found several pods that had split open revealing the ripened seeds! These are ant-dispersed seeds and are a favorite of forest dwelling ants like Aphaenogaster. If you look at this close-up photo, you can see the white elaisomes attached to the seeds. These are the fatty protein packs that ants relish and drag back down into their nests.

 

 

It is an amazing seed dispersal strategy that is apparently most common here in the eastern United States and in South Africa, of all places. The tricky part for a gardener is to plant the seeds before that elaisome dries out because once it does, germination rates drop precipitously. These seeds need a moist warm period, followed by a moist cold period to germinate. To accomplish this, I put the seeds in damp soil in a sealed salad box. I'll ignore them in there until next spring:

 

 

In the same patch of woods, I observed another cool ant/ native plant interaction. Tulip poplar trees are now in full bloom. The nectar rich blossoms are usually high up in these massive trees, but when they fall to the forest floor, ants cover them to enjoy the nectar feast. Here are several flowers covered in Prenolepis imparis ants:

 

 

I plan to plant one or more of these trees in my front yard to replace my dead white oak. Finally, I'll leave you all with some cool spiders I've been enjoying in my yard:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ANTdrew]

Mini Update 5-31-2020

Back at the end of April, I dug up two pieces of dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum) to propagate asexually. I'm sure you all have been eager to find out how it worked out (wink, wink), so here you go:


Only one of the two pieces established and is now sending out new growth. The new growth is already attracting aphids, so that's great from an ant-lover’s perspective!
My seedlings are looking healthy, too, and continue growing steadily. In two or three years, I'll have a mighty thicket of this stuff in my yard. Buahahaha!

Edited by ANTdrew, May 31 2020 - 11:31 AM.

[RushmoreAnts]

Update 5-21-2020
 
 This is one of the coldest springs I can remember in over a decade.

Here it’s supposed to get to 90 here tomorrow. Snow and December temperatures in April, middle-of-July temperatures in May......... that’s South Dakota for you.

[RushmoreAnts]

Mini Update 5-31-2020
Back at the end of April, I dug up two pieces of dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum) to propagate asexually. I'm sure you all have been eager to find out how it worked out (wink, wink), so here you go:

Only one of the two pieces established and is now sending out new growth. The new growth is already attracting aphids, so that's great from an ant-lover’s perspective!
My seedlings are looking healthy, too, and continue growing steadily. In two or three years, I'll have a mighty thicket of this stuff in my yard. Buahahaha!

I love plants that do this. I’ve noticed that Beebalm does this quite often. It can get annoying when it outcompetes everything else in the garden and starts invading the lawn, though...........

[BeginnerAntKeeper]

Update?

[ANTdrew]

I’ll put one together this week.

[ANTdrew]

Update 7-13-2020

 

It's been a while and a really crazy time for my garden in general. About 40% of it was destroyed by extensive (and expensive!) foundation repairs we had to do on my ghetto home. I'm approaching this with a growth mindset, though, and looking at it as a chance for a blank canvas.

 

Here's one of the bare patches I'll be working on replanting. It'll be fun to document it on here and show how one can create a native plant habitat without spending a fortune.

 

The first step I did was tilling up the heavy clay soil as much as I could. Clay is such a PITA to work with.

 

Then I drove to our city leaf mulch pile, which is where household leaves are taken each year and converted into free mulch. I gathered up three big trash bags worth of the mulch and worked it into the clay.

 

 

I covered everything with some cheap top soil from Home Depot to finish prepping the beds. I'll be planting the bed with native perennials I grew from seeds that you can see in earlier posts in this journal. I want to have some color and pollinator habitat this year, though, so I planted a crap ton of annual seeds that should hopefully bloom profusely by the end of summer and into the fall. I planted a mix of Cosmos, Zinnias, and sunflowers, none of which are native, but they are certainly not invasive in any way. The copious nectar and pollen they put out is great for pollinators of all kinds. I'll keep this well watered until the seeds germinate and hope that the squirrels don't eat all the sunflowers.

 

 

 

 

[ANTdrew]

Photo Update 7-24-2020

 

The seeds I planted in my last post have germinated now. Hopefully they'll put on a nice display and pollinator buffet as summer ends.

 

Thread-waisted wasp:

 

Sand wasp:

 

Painted lady butterfly: