Looks can be deceiving

I walked past a Beech tree earlier this summer and it looked like it was growing mold.

It had this white fuzzy stuff all up and down the trunk. As I looked closer I saw that there were different kinds of insects all over it too.










This lady beetle was hanging out there. It might not look like much, but these little guys can eat a lot of insects! In fact, when I saw it here I knew that more was going on here than meets the eye. This lady beetle is called the twice-stabbed lady beetle or Chilocorus stigma. They eat a variety of insects like aphids, mealybugs, and scale insects.                                                                                                           

As it turns out, this lady beetle was here because the white fuzzy stuff that I saw was not mold, it was scale insects! These are beech scales (AKA wooly beech scale) and they are not good for the tree. They feed on the sap and if there are enough of them on the tree for a long enough time they will weaken it and make it more susceptible to disease. Hopefully, the lady beetles and other predators that I saw on the tree trunk will help the tree fight off this pest.





When I looked even more closely I saw that the lady beetle wasn't the only predator there.

This is a lacewing larva. If you look closely you can see that this thing that looks like a bundle of debris actually has legs and a head. These larvae put bits of whatever they can find on their backs for camouflage and to protect them from predators. Lacewing larvae are voracious predators themselves.  They eat a variety of insects, as long as they can get their jaws into them.

Their jaws are the two light brown sickle-like appendages sticking out of the front of this one. Once lacewing larvae get their jaws into a prey item, they inject a toxic saliva that kills it and then they suck out the contents like a milkshake!

Bee-ka-boo!

Its that time of year again!


The flowers are blooming,

and the bees are hard at work to collect all that pollen!

These bees pack their pollen into little balls and put it in these hollow reeds for their offspring to feed on.

This photo is of a bee habitat made by someone who wanted to attract bees to their garden! If you look really close you might be able to see some bee faces poking out.
Flowers produce two types of food that bees need: pollen and nectar. Nectar is the sweet sugary (mostly fructose) liquid that honey bees use to make honey. Nectar is an important source of carbohydrates for bees and it gives them the energy they need to fly around from flower to flower all day. Pollen on the other hand is the bees' main source of protein.  They feed the pollen to their young to help them grow. If you look closely at a bee foraging on a flower you can usually see the pollen stuck to hairs on their legs,

or underneath their abdomen.