winter thoughts

it's the end of december and the end of the decade and time to reflect on a few things. after working for 20 years on art-related publications, i find it almost impossible to write without an image or two to give it credibility.

the barn is well stocked with split black cherry firewood and the slender poles await the saw. those are the remains of the round corral that the cowbow manque' across the road built. when finally the big collapsed barn was taken down in september, several of us scavenged wood, as most of it was just being burned up in fires night and day. now we have a different view from the front of our house, a long view across the fields to the distant forest.

we're hoping that the shed on the right will collapse on its own, leaving only the shabby deteriorating house across the road. it has been suggested that the most useful future for the house would be to donate it to the volunteer fire department for practice.

the work i did this summer on nine different assessments for the huron river watershed's bio-reserve project was so interesting and i learned so much from the truly experienced scientists on the project. of the nine sites , only one area was really quite pristine and happily it is near here a few miles to the west on six mile road. most of it is wet forest, a flood plain along a winding creek, and there were almost no invasive species. we found a stand of endangered wildflowers, the brilliant blue closed gentian. we hope that the owners will be interested in preserving it with a conservation easement.

but the other eight sites were less encouraging. some were abandoned agricultural fields with solid monotypic stands of autumn olive, canada thistle, goldenrod or, worse, wild parsnip. some were second-growth forests with a ground cover of garlic mustard, which eliminates native spring wildflowers like trillium, bloodroot, and may apple. others were over-grazed and full of spotted knapweed. a well-established hardwood forest was flooded as the result of a large virtually abandoned housing development adjacent that changed the flow of water onto the neighbor's land, killing the trees and plants.

the organizers of the bioreserve project assured me that there were many promising sites among the 80-some surveyed; the degraded ones i'd seen were just a coincidental luck of the draw.

next year i'm planning to contact the four owners of the forest across the road, which extends all the way west to earhart road, to get their permission to do an assessment. my own informal look makes me think it's in pretty good shape. there is a stand of large beech, now relatively rate in s.e. michigan. now all we have to do is find the money to buy the 80 acres and build a small modern house well back off the road, keep the fields in cultivation, and put a conservation easement on it all. anyone want to chip in?

the bald-faced hornet's nest

This summer I spotted a large paper nest in the maple tree in our front yard. When it came time to write a short final paper for field biology, I chose it as my subject.

The bald-faced hornet (Also called Dolichovespula maculata in Dunn (255) is not a true hornet, but in the wasp (Vespidae) family, related to the yellow jacket, but with a larger body and black and white coloration. Its face is white, suggesting the name. They are social wasps, who form communities built on a caste system, consisting of a queen who is served by her sterile female daughters. With mouthparts for biting and chewing, vegetarian adults drink liquids and feed on ripe fruit; they masticate insects to feed the carnivorous larvae.
In the spring, a fertile queen builds a small nest alone, lays an egg in each cell, feeds the larvae, and a first generation of “daughters” is born. The queen keeps their ovaries from developing by aggressive behavior towards them in the “form of head butting and shoulder charging” (O’Toole 190) and they become workers who enlarge the nest, creating cells for the queen’s eggs. All she does from the time the worker generation emerge is lay eggs; the workers bring her food, defend the nest, collect wood pulp to enlarge the nest with many additional cells, and gather food and feed the larvae. The legless, grublike larvae signal for food by scratching on the walls of their cells and a worker will offer a tiny pellet of masticated insects, often mosquitoes or flies. There are reports of worker wasps snatching a fly in mid-flight. Farmers welcome the bald-faced hornets who live near cattle or horse barns.
When the adult insect emerges, she too becomes a worker. She seals off her cell, which has collected excrement, and it is enlarged it to make room for a new egg. The colonies grow all during the summer and may contain as many as 500 or more individuals. These become very aggressive if disturbed and each individual can and will sting repeatedly.
The nest has one entrance hole towards the bottom and is well insulated with several outer layers of paper to maintain an ideal temperature of about 86 degrees F (30C) If it becomes too warm, the workers will cluster around it and beat their wings to cool it down and bring in drops of water to moisten the cells; if too cool, the workers will perform an exercise, rapidly expanding and contracting their abdomens, and raise the temperature (Frisch 62).
Both the initial small nest and the subsequent large one are made of paper in the same way. The insects use their serrated mandibles to scrape weathered wood, often posts, fences, and telephone poles, for pulp; mix the pellets with their saliva and build the nest by stretching out each section, aligning the wood fibers for strength (Frisch 61). As they build, they use their antennae as calipers to measure the walls of each cell. A glandular secretion is added to outer surface; it hardens like lacquer to waterproof the paper (Wooten 126).
The elaborate nests are used for only one season; at the end of summer a generation of fertile females and males emerges and mates. The males die. The fertile queens overwinter in leaf litter or in the hollow of a tree; the workers become disoriented and die. The queens start construction of a new nest each spring.
 This seems like an extraordinary labor-intensive and elaborate system for insuring the continuance of the species. 

References
Dunn, Gary A. , Insects of the Great Lakes Region, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Frisch, Karl von, Animal Architecture, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
Milne, Lorus and Margery, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1980.
O’Toole, Christopher, Alien Empire: An Exploration of the Lives of Insects, New York, Harper Collins, 1995.
Stokes, Donald W., A Guide to Nature in Winter, Boston, Little Brown and Co., 1976.
Wooten, Anthony, Insects of the World, London, Facts on File, Cassell Illustrated, 2002.