Just a photo today, but a pretty awesome one I reckon. An inbound bumble bee from my parents' garden in the Wairarapa:

Labels: bee, bumblebee, environment and ecology, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

Last week I told you all that I had a great idea for a Sunday Spinelessness post, but not enough time write it. So, of course, this week I've managed my time in such a way... that there's still no way I'm going to get to write that idea up.

I'll leave that idea for another day, and, instead take inspiration from one of Alex Wild's recent posts at Myrmecos. The bug-blogo-sphere is filled with wonderful photographers, producing absolutely stunning portraits of the little creatures that run our world. When I go out fossicking for bugs, it's images like Alex's ants and Ted's beetles that I have in mind. That mindset inevitiably leads to dissapointment, since I'm restricted to a point an shoot camera. As much as I love my camera, it's never going to challenge dSLRs for image quality and its lens can't produce the sort of magnification a really good macro lens can. But, Alex points out, I shouldn't be disappointed that my camera can't do something it's not designed for, instead, I should take advantage of some of the things digicams really are good at. In partcular, the small lenses used in these cameras create a wide depth of focus, which can capture not just a bug, but a little of the the way the world looks form a bug's point of view. With this new idea in mind I went out today and... well, completely failed to get anything interesting. It was a grey sort of a morning here in Dunedin there wasn't much life out at about. Instead, here are a few older images that gel with Alex's tips:

First, a soldier beetle looking for food in masterwort flowers in the UBC Botanical Gardens in Vancouver. I tried, and failed, to get a close up of these beetle's face; but did get this one:

Flowers seem to be the over-arching theme in thse photos. A bumblebee visiting a dahlia (I probably should have thought a bit harder about the background here...):

I've taken a few decent photos of bumblebees, but I've never taken a good one of a honeybee. Or at least, I've never taken a good photo of a sinlge honey bee, I quite like this one with hundreds of bees flying in and out of their hives.

And finally, back to the dahlia for my favourite of these photos. A tiny fly, far too small for my camera to capture in any great detail, but looking pretty good in this setting:

edit: I forgot to include a link to The Geek in Question, who followed up Alex's article with some more great tips

Labels: bee, beetle, bumblebee, fly, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

I'm going to round out Sunday Spinelessness for 2010 with a few updates from the creatures that have featured here over the year. But, since this is going to be last post here till the first week of January or so, I'm going to start by taking just a moment to wish everyone who has commented on, linked to, tweeted about or just read The Atavism this year a merry Christmas and an enjoyable break over the new year. I enjoy writing these posts for their own sake, but it's much more satisfying to be part of a community (no matter how small a part!) of people that are interested in the same ideas I am. Thanks.

Right, now own with the spinelessness. The little green spiders I've been following, and sacrificing in the name of science are still going strong. Since the last time I wrote about them I've seen them grab prey for the first time (confirming the suspicion that they are ambush predators) and seen males fight for the right to mate with a female. Sadly, I didn't photograph either of these events (well, not in a way that I'd want to show other people, but there are descriptions of each tucked away in my notebook). I can, however, show you the result of those matings. About three weeks after the first one I started spotting these across the agapanthus:

At last count there were about five separate leaves sporting one of these egg sacs and a watchful mother. One very dedicated mum-to-be actually has three on the go at the moment!

I'll have to wait a while to see the next generation of the little green spiders, but the leaf-veined slugs that featured along side them here have already moved into the next stage

I haven't seen a full-sized slug in a long time. But these immature ones are out and about every evening, I'll have a little more to say about them in the new year.

The pittasporum "pysllids" are still dancing, but no longer at plague proportions. There's no respite for the pittasporum though, now it's being devoured by leaf roller moths. If I cared more about the tree I might spray it with insecticide but while its pests are feeding animals as wonderful as this spider (anyone have a clue on an ID?) I'm happy to let them have it:

Finally, the bumblebee nest at the bottom of the garden appears to be enjoying the run of hot weather we've had here. Some of the bees in our backyard (no necessarily the ones that live at the bottom, since bumble bees can forage several kilometres from their base) have taken up a slightly odd habit. On a couple of warm evenings I've popped outside and found bumblee bees asleep inside foxglove flowers:

No doubt the little tubes make a nice warm place for a worker to spend the night if they are caught out too late to make it home. Apparently males, which are only produced towards the end of summer, will often do the same trick once they've left the nest and are spending their daytime waiting for a virgin queen to pass by. I think we really have to end with a bumble bee bum sticking out of a flower:

Labels: arachnophilia, bee, blog blogging, bumblebee, environment and ecology, leaf veined slugs, sci-blogs, spider, sunday spinelessness

Spring hasn't quite sprung down here in Dunedin, but it's definitely on it's way. I've just mowen the lawns for the first time in, well, a little while and the garden is full of hints that the days are getting longer and warmer. Two of the traditional Kingdoms ignored by The Atavism are are kicking into reproductive mode:

As you might imagine, I like my harbingers of spring to be a bit more mobile than plants or fungi and a bit more spineless that lambs or swallows. Nothing says spring to me like the low drone of bumblebee queen. Bumblebees can't stand the winter across most of New Zealand, so each bumblebee nest puts it's entire investment in the next flower fulled sumer into a few queens and a few males (bumblebees are like honey bees in that all the workers are female). At the end of one summer the queens fly out, mate, then find a warm dry spot to hibernate through the winter. Right now our garden has two or three big fat queens scoping out every nook and cranny, hoping to find a spot to set up a new nest.

Here's one unfortunate queen who stayed out too late last night, I found her on the lawn drenched by dew and too cold to move.

She's spent about an hour now on a sunny step and has started to walk about and vibrate her wings, I imagine she'll be on her way soon. Obviously, I couldn't resist the opportunity to get some closeups from a model that was unlikely to get away. I had plenty of opportunities to photograph bumblebees last summer, because we had a nest in our garden. I got tonnes of photos of the workers out collecting nectar and pollen:

And moving in and out of the nest (I recorded about one flight in or out every minute in the middle of the day in the middle of summer):

But i have to admit those "good" shots were vastly outnumbered by out of focus blurs, like this one that looks like to could be the last photograph I took before I was overcome by a swarm of angry bees: For the record, bumblebees can sting (there is an urban myth about them biting, but you can ignore that) and by all accounts you'd rather not be stung by one. But they aren't at all aggressive, this one did fly into my camera but then it just buzzed off to the next flower.

Labels: bee, bumblebee, environment and ecology, photos, sci-blogs, spring

Not much time to write today, so let's make the photos do the work! I was really taken by these signs during my recent visit to Vancouver:

That one is form Stanley Park, but there were others around the city and each of them was in-front of a little roosting box made for the the native mason bees. As you can read on the sign, or at the organising group's website, the boxes are part of a project including schools and the community in maintaining these important pollinators. I didn't get any photos of the Blue Orchard Mason Bee these boxes are designed for, but am probably the only preson to have left the University of Bristish Columbia's expansive Botanic Gardens with ten times as many photos of insects and plants. Here is another of Vancouver's native pollinating bees, I'm pretty sure it's Bombus bifarius (it's definitely a bumblebee)

Labels: bee, bumblebee, Canada, environment and ecology, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness