Pollinators hard at work!
Category: Bees, Butterflies, Culture, Ecology, Flies, Forests, Moths, Pollination | Date: Nov 17 2009 | By: dududiaries
Pollinators hard at work!
“One in three bites of food can be attributed to a pollinator”. This statement is often quoted by biologists around the world when talking about pollinators and their importance to our lives.
In Africa pollinators are primarily wild insects that travel between farms and natural habitat, and are extremely vulnerable to habitat loss and destruction.
Pollinators intimately link wild species with basic human livelihoods. The relationships between insects and flowers are at once ancient, beautifully intricate and correspondingly fragile.
These intricate and essential links between wild species, natural areas and food production were beautifully evident on a recent visit I paid to a farmer in Western Kenya. Lucy Murira grows a wide range of vegetables and fruits for her family. Her farm is located in the Nandi Hills nestled between tea plantations and forest patches. It is these forest patches that provide the pollinators for Lucy’s crops. Below is a short video showing some of the crops and pollinators on Lucy’s farm. (Please forgive the sloppiness of this video - it is my first attempt at doing this!)
As mentioned in the video, one of the important and nutritious crops growing on this farm is ‘Njahe’ a local variety of blackbean. It is a verdant climber with lovely pinky-lilac flowers.
The main pollinators of the blackbean here appear to be wild bees, including these lovely, robust and fast-flying carpenter bees.
Without the pollinating visits of these hardworking bees, there would be no pods to harvest.
One of the other crops growing here that benefits from pollination is the butterbean. As Lucy says, these are really yummy (in fact one of my favourites!). Skipper butterflies and bees were pollinating the butterbeans on this farm. All of them need the patches of forest to survive.
Pollinators need a clean, safe and pesticide-free environment to survive. Lucy’s farm is filled with a huge number of different pollinating insects. Not only were pollinating insects thriving on the farm, we even found this little reed frog dozing among the tendrils of the butterbeans!
More from the wonderful world of bugs soon!
Tags: Bees, Butterflies, dino j. martins, food security, indigenous vegetables, Kenya, pollinators
Male bees on patrol…
Category: Bees, Culture, Ecology | Date: Nov 16 2009 | By: dududiaries
Male bees keeping watch on their patch of bush….
Dear All, Hello – have just been travelling through Western Kenya working on pollinators at various sites with groups of farmers. Its been amazing and I look forward to sharing some of the discoveries and photographs with you all over the next few days.
Yesterday I spent the day looking at insects in some mango farms in the Kerio Valley. During the hottest part of the day we decided to take a break and shelter in the shade while eating our lunch of (you guessed it!) mangoes.
As I settled down to the mango feast I noticed a loud buzzing sound drawing closer. Then a flash of yellow and black whirred by. A few seconds later it returned. At first I though, hmmm, this is someone after a piece of my mango. However, it kept circling the bush and showed no interest in the fruit.
As I watched it closely, I realised that it was a male carpenter bee patrolling its territory. Looking out over the dappled bush I realised that there were literally hundreds of male bees doing the same thing – endlessly circling some prime spot in the hope of a female wandering by…
Every ten seconds or so it returned to hover in a sunspot in front of me.
It kept this up for the entire half-hour break that we took for lunch. Four hours later as I prepared to call it a day, the same male bees were still at it, endlessly circling their little patches of bush in the hopes of wooing a lady carpenter bees’ heart…
Tags: Bees, dino j. martins, Kenya, kerio valley, xylocopa
Life from death…
Category: Beetles, Climate Change, Culture, Ecology, Flies | Date: Nov 13 2009 | By: dududiaries
Life from death…
As many of you will have read and heard on this site – there’s been a serious drought in Kenya and this has lead to lots of cattle dying. Out here on the plains we finally got some rain, and this means that there is a lot of green grass and wildflowers sprouting everywhere.
The herds of cattle that have survived (mainly from accessing grazing in the park) can be seen moving around a bit more happily now.
There are also a lot of trees and shrubs flowering at the moment. Many of these are pollinated by flies.
Over the past few days I’ve noticed large numbers of flies visiting these flowers that are fly-pollinated. Species of plants with flowers that are open pollinated by flies tend to have greenish-yellow flowers with a musty scent and nectar.
One of the most abundant fly pollinators is known as the Big-Headed Fly (Lucilia sp.). This fly has a distinctive red head (actually the eyes). And there are literally thousands upon thousands of these flies now pollinating a variety of trees and shrubs on the plains.
The reason for the abundance of fly pollinators is due to the abundance of dead cows.
The flies lay their eggs in the carcasses where their larvae, the maggots, develop. In the process the flies help clean up the carcasses as they speed up their decomposition and break-down, and this also results in lots of flies to act as pollinators and as food for other creatures.
On the same bush the flies are pollinating I found this smug-looking little reed frog. Hmmm – I wonder why he looks so satisfied?
It is not only the flies that are benefitting from the surfeit of food. Several beetles that also visit flowers, like the lovely Rose Chafer shown below, breed in the deep piles of cow manure.
So from death and waste comes life again – thanks to the efficient re-cycling of Mother Nature! More from the wonderful world of bugs soon!
Tags: Beetles, drought, Flies, Kajiado, Kenya, Lucilia, Pachnoda
Ant in the evening…
Category: Ants, Culture, Ecology, Forests | Date: Nov 11 2009 | By: dududiaries
Ant in the evening…
A few weeks ago while visiting a forest at the coast I took a stroll in the evening. One of the most common kinds of ants along the East African coast are members of the genus Polyrachis. These are fairly large (as ants go!), over 1 cm long, and can commonly be found clambering around houses and trees.
This particular ant was wandering up a twig of a tangled shrub at the edge of the path. It walked up and down the stem several times before climbing onto a leaf. These ants are famous for tending other insects – primarily bugs of various kinds that suck plant juices and reward the ants with treats of honeydew. I found this bug lying against the stem where the ant was walking up and down.
After a few minutes, the ant clambered on to a leaf in the sunshine. There it sat sunning itself for a few minutes before wandering off.
I wonder what it was thinking of – perhaps ‘How do I get home to my colony?’, Or was it, just like I was, enjoying the evening sunshine streaming through the forest… It seems that even ants need a moment to themselves sometimes.
Tags: Ants, Dino Martins, Kenya, polyrachis, watamu
Hints of life…
Category: Butterflies, Ecology | Date: Nov 10 2009 | By: dududiaries
Dear All, thanks for your comments and interest in the world of bugs. Was just down in the Rift Valley at Olorgesailie where it is still so dry, dry, dry. Found one tiny bedraggled Grewia bush in flower, with a couple of tiny lycaenids and an interesting day-flying moth visiting the flowers…
Happy little Buffs…
Category: Ants, Butterflies, Culture, Ecology | Date: Nov 02 2009 | By: dududiaries
Hello!
Sorry for not posting more often – have been really busy chasing after bugs now that the rains have started and they are popping out all over the place!
Many, many thanks to everyone for their kind comments on the blog post ‘Ants in the dust’. I will try and post a link to the BBC piece on it when I can figure out the technical side of it today or tomorrow.
A couple of days ago in a tiny forest fragment near Nairobi I spotted these little beauties whirling about some buds. From a distance they looked like tiny little orange flames dancing in the dappled light. On taking a closer look I saw that they were tiny orange and brown lycaenid butterflies.
Known as ‘Buffs’, these tiny jewels are part of a large and diverse group of butterflies in the family Lycaenidae. This species is Baliochila fragilis – an apt name for their delicate build. The caterpillars of these butterflies feed on lichens, often high up in the forest trees, so it was interesting to find them hovering about near the ground.
Looking closely at the butterflies perching on the buds of the Chlorophytum, I noticed that there were a lot of ants running up and down the buds too. And then I noticed that the butterflies had their tiny proboscis unfurled and were feeding from in between the young buds. These buds secrete extra-floral nectar which is intended to attract ants that then patrol the buds and protect them from would-be nibblers of the insect-kind. However, as the butterflies posed no threat the flowers, the ants seemed to tolerate them.
In fact, the butterflies were so relaxed that quite a few of the males were courting the females. The pair in the video clip below show the typical interaction. The male sidles up to the female. She rejects him with a flick of her wings and moves on trying to keep feeding. He follows her and flicks his own wings at her trying to win her over… She rejects him and keeps on moving… the cycle is repeated over and over again. I guess eventually some of the most perseverant males win one of the females over!
More from the wonderful world of bugs soon!
Tags: Ants, Baliochila, Butterflies, Dino Martins, lepidoptera, lycaenidae, Technomyrmex
Bees in the news
Category: Bees, Climate Change, Culture, Ecology | Date: Oct 16 2009 | By: dududiaries
Bees in the news
Dear All – here are a couple of links that might be of interest. Bees have been in the news over the last couple of days.
Newsweek has an article about the effect of bees disappearing on agriculture.
Here is the link to it:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/141461
And George Monbiot who writes for The Guardian has a piece on the failure of science to investigate the effects of pesticides on bees:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/oct/14/bees-scientific-research
Please spare a moment if you can to look at them. Bees are in deep trouble, especially in Europe and North America as well as parts of Asia such as China. Whatever the may causes behind the decline of bees, especially the honeybee, we need to wake up and start doing something about it.
There is also a new film out called ‘The Vanishing Bees’, you can watch a trailer and learn more about it here:
More soon – was just watching some honeybees foraging on the flowers of some acacias, will share those pictures shortly.
Blog Action Day - Climate Change!
Category: Climate Change, Culture, Ecology, Lakes | Date: Oct 15 2009 | By: dududiaries
Dear All - thanks for the kind comments - only just saw them!
Will post a link to the BBC piece asap.
On a separate note, today is Blog Action Day and the topic of focus is climate change. As I write this it is raining outside (unusual that its before 7 am) and this is the first real rain we have had this year! It last drizzled here on the 24th of July - so we’ve had almost three months with NO rain at all. Livestock and wildlife are suffering all around, as are people, who depend on the grasslands and rivers for survival.
Insects are just one group of creatures that are deeply affected by climate change - butterflies and bees get confused about when to forage or leave their hives, and are more susceptible to diseases and parasites when stressed by unusual weather patterns…
For more information on this global event, please look at
More from the world of bugs soon!
Incredible!
Category: Culture, Ecology, Spiders | Date: Oct 14 2009 | By: dududiaries
Dear All – many thanks for the kind comments and I will respond to some of the questions soon. I just found and photographed the most incredible ‘creepy-crawlies’ in my house this evening.
As I was brushing my teeth, I noticed someone watching me quietly from the corner. The area around my sink is fairly sheltered and there are several regulars who hang out there: a cave cricket, moth flies, darkling beetles and a large wall spider. This evening I noticed someone new. It took me a while to register that there was someone there watching as the interloper did not move much.
I took at closer look and the little eight-legged fellow that peered back at me simply blew me away. Right there in from of my eyes was one of the most elusive and remarkable spiders in the world.
Everyone will be familiar with the typical spiders that construct webs and trap prey in them. This particular spider does things a little differently. This spider is commonly known as the Net-casting spider. Unlike most spiders who are simply content to sit and wait in their webs for some hapless bug to fly into it, these amazing spiders take the web strategy a step further. They weave a flexible net-liked web which they hold with the front legs. They do this dangling from a twig or some other promising perch. They support themselves using a scaffold of taut non-sticky silk that they lay down first. You can just see the lines of this scaffold in the corners in some of the pictures.
Enjoy the pictures of the Net-casting spider and I hope that you will be as amazed as I was…
When an insect wanders by, the Net-casting spider then throws the net over the prey! Truly, truly one of the most amazing spiders on the planet.
Tags: Deinopidae, dino j. martins, Kenya, net-casting spider, spider, spiderweb
Ants in the dust…
Category: Ants, Culture, Ecology | Date: Oct 13 2009 | By: dududiaries
Ants in the dust…
The drought continues here on the plains. Today at midday I stopped by the harvester ant nest to check on how they were doing. While most of the other animals were resting almost comatose in the shade due to the burning heat, the ants were hard at work.
They were working hard at scrounging whatever they could find out on the parched, overgrazed grassland. The harvester ants typically feed on the seeds of grasses. They diligently collect these from the surrounding areas and carefully carry them back to their nest. However, at the moment there is hardly any grass around, let along grass seeds, as everything has been nibbled away by the voracious mouths of cattle. Despite their desperate attempts to graze, the cattle are still dying in large numbers.
The ants were still trying to find food out in the midday sun nonetheless. I watched them bringing back all manner of things to their nest. In these tough times beggars can’t be choosers. Here is schematic sketch of their nest in the dust…
They brought back tiny dried bits of grass, no more than mere wisps of dessicated leaves. A few lucky ants had found the odd large seed or tiny pod from one of the many herbs that grow hidden in clefts among the rocks where mouths and hooves can’t reach them. Some managed to find the odd wisp of grass seed that was tucked away in a rocky crack out of reach to hungry cows…
A few lucky ants even managed to catch the odd item of prey – though these were mainly hapless bugs who themselves had succumbed to the heat and drought.
After just a few minutes of watching them I was so hot and starting to feel dizzy from the glare. I walked away from the nest seeking scant shade and wondering how life just keeps on going even in the face of such adversity. I hope that we get some rain soon!
More from the wonderful world of bugs soon.
Tags: BBC Digital Planet, cattle, dino j. martins, drought, harvester ants, Messor
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