biodiverseed: biodiverseed: Insect Hotels Over 30% of solitary...

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biodiverseed:

biodiverseed:

Insect Hotels

Over 30% of solitary bee species are wood nesters, some spending up to nine months of their lives as larvae incubating in forest deadfall. Ladybugs hibernate over winter in stacks of twigs, and other beneficial creatures – like wasps, lizards, moths, hedgehogs, beetles, and dragonflies – love to find little nooks and crannies to hide from predators and the elements, at any time of year.

An insect hotel is ideally placed in a sheltered location, but still in the sunlight. Ants sometimes eat bee larvae, so a solitary bee hotel is best placed off of the ground. Often, a wire mesh is placed on the outside to prevent bird predation. Ideally, the surrounding area should host flowering and insectary plants, to provide food for the guests!

These natural habitats are often missing from a domestic or overly-landscaped garden, and are absolutely vital to the health of your plants, local life web, and for the pollination of your garden. Designing for your native wildlife is crucial for a long-term healthy, productive, and sustainable space. Good, ecologically-minded design also minimises the amount of work you have to do: for example, I find that when I practice companion planting with insectary Apiaceae-family plants, I never have an aphid problem, because predatory beetles abound, and they eat problematic insects before they get established. Creating balanced ecosystems is a form of biological pest control.

An insect hotel is easily made from twigs, wood, tiles, pinecones, bricks, bark, grass, and other natural or salvaged materials. The form can differ, depending on what sort of creatures you would like to attract, and your aesthetics, but it should basically be designed from a “bug’s eye” view of the world: research what your local species are and what they require in terms of a habitat, and then create it for them in a manner that appeals to your eye.

These are also excellent projects for kids: they are fun and easy to make, interesting to observe, and help foster an early understanding of biology and ecology.

#DIY #bees #insects #entomology #biomimicry #permaculture #kids #art

Pre-made insect hotels: North America / Europe

Images:

B. Alter - Royal Bank of Canada New Wild Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show

sav-überlingen.de

Sissi de Kroon, flickr.com

Insect hotel in Hoofddorf, Holland. Bob Daamen, flickr.com

Cheshire Wildlife Trust, cheshirewildlifetrust.org.uk

Kevin Smith and Lisa Lee Benjamin. floragrubb.com

Inspiration Green Article on Insect Hotels

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This morning I dreamed I went to some sort of class or

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This morning I dreamed I went to some sort of class or something that was held in my uncle’s house, which had been cleared out and refurbished and was amazing, and my uncle was there and was laughing, in great spirits, about how great the place looked now, and he gave me some weird things he didn’t need anymore and was like, you can probably find a use for these, and the dream is sort of faded and vague but I remember specifically how much he was laughing, how amused he was, and that specifically, he was in great physical shape and had lost a bunch of weight but like, healthily, and he was happy about it and feeling good about himself and the world, and all, in a great mood and very pleased and amused by everything.

I should text Mom; he died in 2011 or so I think, and the person who bought his house recently put it up for rent and I’d been debating about whether it was ethical to pretend I wanted to rent it just so I could see the inside. (He was a hoarder and Mom had to hire two different removal companies to deal with the place. I have never seen it in good shape, I don’t know what that would look like.)

Anyway. I really vividly heard his laugh, my mother’s family has really piercing laughs (which I inherited), and he would do this drawn-out “HA!” when he felt like he’d made a good pun or got one over on my mother, who he tormented ceaselessly. 

It was so nice to see him. He died quite suddenly, between my visits home, so I didn’t get to visit him when he was sick.

It was a weird dream, but. My uncle was pretty weird, so it was kind of true to life, there.
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Да, мама

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Да, мама уже в Москве!

I’ve confirmed, by the way, that the website interface for Duolingo’s Russian course doesn’t actually have grammar lessons either. I thought, oh, those essays are the introductions to them, the anon that messaged me about this must be pointing me toward that…

No, those essays are the sum total. That’s it. You can’t even charitably call them “lessons” at a stretch. They’re like, 300-500 words about concepts of grammar that may or may not be touched on in the accompanying lessons at all– mostly, not. (You’d think it’d be easy to include, as the essay’s example words, something you’d see in the practice drills, but they don’t.) 

(For example, they explain the concept of word order in one of these essays, and then, well, I’m like twelve lessons later already and I still haven’t encountered the words they used in this example. I know him. → Я его́ зна́ю. I know Maria. → Я зна́ю Мари́ю.That includes words like “here”, “in this way”, “then” and so on. That’s their example. But the actual lesson includes actively 0 of those words. Why not do this with a word we’d see elsewhere? Even just– they use example names like Ivan and Dima, why would you use Maria here when that’s not one of the example names we’ve ever seen before? Clearly a totally different person wrote this, and not someone who’d actually looked at the lessons. That’s sort of a minor quibble but when it’s literally all you’re getting you’d think they’d at least… coordinate it? Especially when it’s in an unfamiliar alphabet and your learner is going to struggle with every single word. Also I still don’t know how to say “here” or “in this way” or “then”, and I don’t know how this essay’s content applies to the things I have learned. I just get the word order wrong and the question flags red and I redo it the way it suggests, and I don’t know why, because I don’t understand how it relates to the single example I was given using words I was never taught.)

My method for getting anything at all out of Duolingo as I wait to get the Russian textbook I’m borrowing is that I go to the lesson, write down and look up all the words it says I will learn, look through Google Translate’s related words, try to figure out what the difference is between the singulars and plurals and such, skim the explanatory essays on the Duolingo website interface in hopes of picking up something relevant, and then plow through the lessons by rote, usually with Translate open on the desktop and doing the lessons on my phone because the phone interface rewards you with about twice as many lingots as the desktop interface. 

Like, not to bitch, but. There’s a lot of stuff in the Spanish lessons, and maybe the French and Italian, like, the basic ones they started with, that just aren’t there in the other languages like Russian and Japanese. 

I’m not trying to get fluent, i’m trying to practice enough that I can read street signs and conduct basic negotiations. I just figured I’d come back and point out that, in my defense, it wasn’t that I really genuinely failed to notice entire features of the app. Those features literally don’t exist in my target language. I’m not that oblivious. 
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I have successfully vectorized and then embroidery-so

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I have successfully vectorized and then embroidery-software-digitized an image, with Dude’s help. (He claims not to know anything and then is actually super fluent in graphic design programs. He was like, I dunno how to use Illustrator, and then seamlessly walked me through it. Ha.)

So, I still have to stitch it out, but. VICTORY kinda, we’ll see.

Nothing can stop me now once I’m sure I know what I’m doing mua ha ha sort of ha!
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bonesnail: keiseravendimensjonukjent3: Water springs out of...

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bonesnail:

keiseravendimensjonukjent3:

Water springs out of the Mulberry tree at Dinoša, Montenegro.For the last two decades, during the spring floods, the water has been running out of this old mulberry tree in a village of Dinoša in Montenegro.

I know everyone’s like “hahaha the tree is peeing” but if I saw that in a fantasy setting, that water is either going to make you immortal, crumble to dust, or age back into a zygote.
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On-theme with the weather…

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On-theme with the weather…
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Essential Tips for Building a Durable Walipini Greenhouse - Organic Gardening - MOTHER EARTH NEWS

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Essential Tips for Building a Durable Walipini Greenhouse - Organic Gardening - MOTHER EARTH NEWS:

Any well-functioning year-round greenhouse should be customized for the local climate and conditions. The following tips serve to help you design a durable, year-round underground greenhouse – one that is based on the original Walipini design, but customized for a North American climate. 
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Really. (at Buffalo, New York)

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Really. (at Buffalo, New York)
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