Curry Café: Bug-Friendly Gardening – Supporting Beneficial Insects

In this episode of Curry Café, hosts Ray Gary and Rick McNamer speak with Dave Kollen, a Xerces Society Ambassador, about the vital role pollinators and beneficial insects play in fall ecosystems. Kollen explains the seasonal life cycles of bees, wasps, butterflies, and other insects, highlighting how simple actions can support their survival through winter. […]

Episode Transcript

(00:03):
Well, hello again, KCIW
listeners, and welcome to Curry Cafe.
I'm volunteer and producer Rick McNamer.
Every Sunday from three to 4PM, host Ray
Gary puts together a panel of guests to
discuss topics of interest in our community.
Listeners can participate by texting questions or comments
to (541)

(00:24):
661-4098.
Again, that's (541)
661-4098.
Now here's Ray to tell us about today's
show. Today, we have a a very interesting
show that you don't really hear a whole
lot about,
and our guest is an absolute expert on
this. So I'll I'll let him introduce himself

(00:46):
and tell you what he's gonna talk about
already.
Hello. My name is Dave Collin.
I'm a Xerces Society
ambassador,
also a master melatologist,
and that's a person that studies bees,
and Oregon master naturalist.

(01:07):
The, the latter,
I'm not doing too much of. But just
as an example, I used to survey for
dead birds
along the beaches here.
But I find working with bees a lot
more satisfying. So But but now wait a
minute.
We're gonna we're gonna have to hold up
here for just a second. I knew a
little a little bit about the dead bird

(01:29):
survey. What what Well, there's an organization called
COAST,
Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team. And they
look at,
bird mortality, seabird mortality,
mostly
along the coast from
Oregon all the way Or actually, Northern California
all the way up into Alaska. And

(01:51):
so they've been tracking this data for years.
And if we get weird events like, you
remember the temperature blob that was off the
coast here for a couple of years? Well,
you see increased
mortality in some of the bird species,
because of that. And so that's what that
data is for. But, you know,
after I did that three years in, you

(02:12):
know, picking through dead carcasses and trying to
figure out what the heck it was, measuring
this and measuring that. I said, yeah. Think
I'll start doing something else. Yeah. I guess
if it was just the birds and the
feathers and the bones, but probably a lot
of them are full of maggots and such
by the time you get to The big
birds can be pretty gross. I remember having
yellow jackets crawling around inside the skull on

(02:33):
one bird I was trying to work on.
Okay. We'll give you a bash on on
staying with that Okay. And moving on to
something. Moving on, but one more real quick
thing before you talk about the blob. Isn't
the blob I think we have that going
on this year.
I honestly don't know. I just know it's
a temperature anomaly on that Okay. Water out
there, and I don't know whether we're in.

(02:54):
I saw a little local report out of
my old area, Sacramento, the other day, and
they were talking about the blob
still hanging or hanging around the Northern
Pacific. So hopefully Yeah. It's not, but anyway
okay.
Okay. So Continue. I I just wanna make
a statement. I'm present here in my personal
capacity. So anything I say
really is reflects my personal opinion and not

(03:16):
any of the organizations that I volunteer for.
Okay. Especially if it's controversial. We we say
that a lot too, but the organization still
gets blamed for everything we say. But
So this time of year,
falls just arrived
and things you know, if you're looking at
pollinators and some of the other insects that

(03:36):
we we pay attention to or or not
in our yards.
You know, we see things are just kind
of slowing down.
And,
part of that is the fact that, you
know, we don't get down on our hands
and knees and observe closely because maybe things
aren't slowing down as much as they appear.
You know, we're drawn to these more charismatic

(03:57):
things like butterflies and bumblebees and things like
that.
But,
things do slow down. And if we look,
right now,
we can see, you know, what's going on
with something like bumblebees.
A month ago, I was seeing a lot
of
male bumblebees

(04:18):
and worker bumblebees
out.
And
now, I rarely see
any of those. I don't think I've seen
either a worker or a female
or a male bumblebee in the last week.
What I see now is
what they're called gyns. They're gonna be next
year's queen bumblebees.

(04:38):
And so if you see these big
fat,
you know, black and yellow bumblebees,
those are gonna be queens next year if
they make it through the winter. And so
part of, you know, what what this really
is gonna focus on is what we can
do to help these animals get through the
winter. And I just wanna make a comment.
When I use the word animals, I'm gonna
be using that in a biological

(04:59):
sense. So,
you know, a,
a sow bug a a pill bug, I
should say. That's an animal.
K. So Okay.
Real quick. The pill bug, are those we
used to call roly polies at the time?
Some people call those roll polies. Childhood.
Yeah. Okay. Good. Sow bug is actually something
different. Oh, okay. But Okay. They look a

(05:21):
lot different. Those bugs are not really bugs
in the No. No. Insect. They actually No.
Crustaceans aren't. Right. So I'm gonna use bugs
loosely. Okay.
Not in the strict entomological
sense.
And I may even use the word insect
loosely. Okay. Because insects have six legs and
join it. What what what you were talking
about, the the the queen of bees

(05:44):
going out looking,
for places a couple of weeks ago, I
think it's over now. I could walk through
the woods and walk through clouds of these
flying
insects.
And,
could you explain what those are?
Well
The ant the queen ants is what I'm
talking about. More about what they look like.
A cloud of bugs. Yeah. Yeah. Just like

(06:06):
So I mean, there could be a number
of things there. Right?
There could you could have reproductives
out that handles a lot. So maybe ants
That's what I think they are. Yeah. The
ants going out looking for a new home.
Right. So, you know, what happens, all the
Hymenoptera,
which are, you know, wasps,
bees,
ants, and something called sawflies,

(06:28):
all of those,
have
a reproductive cycle with the exception of
the,
sawflies
where
they're,
social
or the social ones
of those,
they produce at the end of their season,
they produce a lot of males and females.

(06:48):
They all go out. They're on the wing.
They're mating between colonies out
there. And then
they drop, you know, they clip their wings
off and then they're gonna crawl around and
find a new home.
And let me go back. We were talking
a little bit strictly of the flying insect
before. My, hummingbird feeder all of a sudden

(07:09):
has been just inundated with these yellow jackets,
I believe you call them. And that hasn't
that was just has come around in the
last couple three weeks, I've noticed. Yeah. So
that's one of the other pollinators I was
gonna talk about this, you know, this time
of year, what's going on. So, you know,
wasps are one of our groups of pollinators.
Not as good as,
bees are,

(07:30):
at it.
And then, you know, you can break wasps
down into
what we call social wasps and solitary wasps.
So social wasps, there's a group of wasps
that are living together, a colony,
a nest. So yellow jackets are perfect example
of that.
And these are annual,

(07:51):
cycles. So that nest
starts out in this early spring
and it goes through and sometime into the
fall.
What happens is it starts to die off.
At the end of that cycle,
these reproductives are produced,
the males and next year's queens.
And

(08:12):
you're getting away Later in the summer, you
get to where the maximum colony size occurs.
And so there's a lot of mouse to
feed. Mhmm. And that's why the yellow jackets
this time of year seem real pesty a
lot of times. You know, it'd be flying
around you,
and you don't That doesn't really happen much
in the spring.
So they're out looking for food basically is

(08:35):
why they're behaving like that. Honeybees, you see
a lot of honeybees out right now.
And that's because for them,
they're not on an annual basis, right? Those
colonies will go year after year after year,
But they've gotta gather enough honey so that
they've got food resources to make it through
the winter.
Okay. Especially the wild ones. Okay. The agricultural

(08:59):
ones, they'll be fed honey or syrup or
something like that if they need to to
get them over the winter. And do they
swarm here? I've never seen a a honeybee
species.
They they will swarm, especially the feral
ones, meaning the ones that are wild.
Normally,
for people that are keeping bees, they keep

(09:20):
an eye on that. They wanna, you know,
keep that
what what would be a swarm. And and
I'm not an apiculturist,
so I'm just gonna, you know, talk generally
here. But they they try to keep that
so that they can have then a second
hive
off of that.
For those who don't know, and if I'm
wrong about this,
correct me. A swarm is when

(09:42):
one hive kinda gets gets overpopulated
and then a whole bunch of them fly
out and look for a new place to
That's right. The and and it's the old
queen
that goes in the swarm for honeybees.
And the
they were fairly common in Arizona.
I'd be walking in the desert, and all

(10:03):
of a sudden, I'd walk into a swarm.
But from what I
either learned or remember, maybe somebody told me
that the swarm is not dangerous, not like
a hive. A hive that protect the hive,
they're not interested in protecting the swarm so
much. But it is very scary looking, especially
when in Arizona, they say all bees are
Africanized.

(10:23):
So talking
That's yeah. Yeah. All of that Africanized bees.
Well, I all I know is I'm not
gonna I'm gonna quit getting to I don't
get really mad, but my hummingbirds and the
wasp,
the yellow jackets, have a little the hummingbirds
are aggressive alone just with their own. Yeah.
But, boy, there's little fights that I see
out there between them. But I'll just let

(10:43):
it go. Yeah. Let it go.
And and then, you know, our other bees,
you know, in Oregon, we've got, like, 800
bees. 800 different kinds of bees. Sure. And
you can break those into solitary
bees. And
the only,
social bees for the most part are bumblebees.
There's there's some other,

(11:05):
little,
exceptions to that rule, but it varies few.
And so bumblebees,
they've got the same kind of thing going
as
the yellow jacket does. You know, they get
larger and larger, etcetera.
But the social ones,
those bees and wasps, they're social I mean,

(11:26):
solitary ones, solitary bees and solitary wasps,
they are,
at this time of year, they're
gonna be
overwintering,
either in an adult stage
or, as a I don't know if you
remember from biology how the insect life cycle

(11:47):
goes. But, you know, you let have an
egg and then you've got certain
larvae larval stages that come after that and
then they go and maybe make a cocoon,
spin a cocoon around themselves. That's kind of
optional
on these solitary bees.
And then,
eventually, they pupate and they which means they're

(12:09):
getting ready to turn into an adult. Okay.
So you can find those either as a
what they call a prepuperate, just before that
pupation, or adults.
And they'll be in a hollow stem somewhere
waiting to come out next year.
And so, you know, this is what's going

(12:29):
on with these animals at this time of
year. Butterflies and moths.
We could have adults hiding in bushes somewhere
waiting for another warm sunny day, so maybe
they get an opportunity to mate
and and lay eggs.
But, you know,
if we step back,
you know,
and we gotta think, you know, what can

(12:51):
we do now to help these? There's also
something called beneficial insects.
And so, you know, pollinators are important and
people focus on pollinators.
There's been a lot of, you
know,
organization
organizations that have developed around, you know, save
the pollinators, etcetera.
But beneficial insects,

(13:11):
these are things like, you know, lady beetles,
also known as ladybugs,
ground beetles, things that we don't really think
about that much.
And they're really good in our yards because
they've got this job to do. And so
if you look at something like a ladybug,
when when they have larvae out there, their

(13:32):
first
larval instar is
a very active
predator of things like aphids.
And we don't know what's going on in
our yard a lot of times, but these
things are taking care of pest control for
us.
You know, ground beetles, which is a certain
type of beetles, and I maybe add that
there's something like 400,000

(13:53):
different kinds of beetles in the world. But
ground beetles
are one group and they love eating slugs
and snails.
And there's something called harvest men, which looks
a lot like
a daddy long legged spider.
Okay. But a little bit shorter legs. And
you see him out walking around the grass
sometimes.

(14:14):
And there's one of those that specializes in
crawling up into snail shells and getting them.
So you want all these things in your
yard
because they're helping control things so you don't
have to go pull the pesticide can out.
Well, and even the slugs
aren't
I'm gonna go out of my comfort zone

(14:34):
here a little bit, pay grade. But even
some of the slugs can be beneficial and
snails? I mean, people I think exactly. Some.
I don't know about. Okay. Now,
slugs,
well, let me say something here. Go. Yeah.
Beneficial.
What does that mean? Well, that kinda follows
that
beauty is in the eye of the beholder

(14:54):
room.
Right? So who defined that as being beneficial?
Well, we did. Right? Beneficial to us. Mhmm.
K. So we don't consider a slug beneficial
because, well, they don't help us. But in
terms of the overall
food web and decomposition
that's going on, you know, the whole ecological
the whole ecosystem out there, they have a

(15:16):
place in that. You know, they're great, you
know,
at
recycling things and and that. No such thing
as good animals and bad animals. Correct. We're
we're the ones that created those terms. Yeah.
And then tiger beetles, another kind of beetle,
but I I bring it up because they're
they're really interesting. They come out at night
unless you scare them. They're

(15:38):
really good predators,
you know, eat all kinds of things that
we don't want. And maybe they'll eat some
things that we do want, but that's just
the way it works. Right? With a yeah.
Because there's again, to your point, there's no
good and bad. They eat. Mhmm. Collateral damage.
Yeah. Some of them might Yeah. It's up
to us whether they're good or bad. They're
just doing what they do. Tiger beetles, they're

(15:59):
they're they're built. They're evolved to be these
little hunting machines. There's an Australian tiger beetle
that is the world record holder that's the
fastest insect
in the world.
It can run
eight feet in a second.
Hope we don't encounter one of those. And
you think about what that means. Well, you
wouldn't know it if you did.

(16:19):
Well, that's not That's pretty fast. So you
think about that in terms of, okay, how
far across his booth is eight feet and
then boom. Yeah. So we've got we have
Well, listen. I wanna I wanna let everybody
again know, if you have a question, we
have the gentleman here to answer your question.
So you can text in (541)
661-4098.

(16:40):
And, Dave, I wanted to real quick you
talked about basically, this time of year coming,
there's a lot of hibernators
also. Right. But our climate we have a
lot of microclimates, I guess, all over the
well, Oregon itself from High Desert to and
here we are on the coast. Our climate's
pretty mellow.
I and you talked about a warm day.
If if we all of a sudden get
one unusual warm day, will some of these

(17:02):
insects,
animals, if you will, come out of hibernation?
No. It Okay. If they're actually in
hibernation, what they they call diapause a lot
of times,
My understanding
of what it takes to break that is
really these kind of multi day,
events.
They're also,

(17:23):
sensitive to things like photoperiods.
So if they're close enough to where they're
getting any sense of what the light is,
you know, they know whether it's a short
day out there
or not.
Okay. And so there's there's a number of
factors that play into when they break diapause
and come out.
The daylight has a lot to do with,
a lot of that. I I used to

(17:44):
keep horses in Alaska,
and when the day started getting longer,
the the horse's body thought, well, spring is
here, but it ain't here.
And,
and and they will they will be shedding
mountains of hair that they still need because
it's gonna still be cold for a while.
But somehow, they got it figured out that
they make it through that.

(18:05):
Yeah. So, you know, we just back up
and kinda to the point you're saying, Rick,
is,
you know, some of these,
various animals that we've talked about here, these
beneficials and pollinators,
some of those,
and then mostly the beneficial insects, some of
those will be active all year round, especially

(18:27):
in our climate
because it's so mild. You know? And,
if you were in a desert or something
like that or, you know, up at 5,000
foot elevation somewhere,
that's not gonna be the case. Mhmm. Yeah.
Maybe with some exceptions.
But you won't have much that's hanging out.
Before we leave,
beneficial, I don't know, for good one. I

(18:48):
have to,
put in a a vote, I guess, from
some of my favorite animals since I'm kind
of an amateur
herpetologist.
And
I see people get all upset when there's
a snake in their yard.
And that's actually a good thing almost everywhere,
but it is a very good thing here.

(19:09):
The snakes here in Oregon are garter snakes.
That's all there are. And they're extremely beneficial.
They're nothing but good. They eat bugs. They
eat slugs. They eat all sorts of things
that we don't like.
Not to mention the fact that they're very
interesting and beautiful to watch.
I'm a snake lizard guy, man, so I
love them all.

(19:29):
And same thing with,
frogs and toads.
Oh, yeah. Also very beneficial. Salamanders?
Mhmm. Yeah. We have those here. Yep. We've
got a garter snake in our yard I
see every once in a while. Yeah. I
I have a I have a a pond,
a fish pond, and,
all through the summer, there's, it's full of,

(19:50):
tadpoles.
And I have two snakes that are regulars
that spend almost the whole summer
right at my pond. They know me. They
don't run away when they see me or
anything. They're kinda my buds, and they
help themselves to whatever tadpoles I can, pulse
I can which is an amazing amount, and
they get really, really good at at catching
them. But

(20:11):
Snakes aren't pollinators, however. I don't believe, are
they, Dave? Well, they're probably They're not. With
the tail tail on a bush once in
a while, and they get Stanley, and then
There you go.
And I wanna go
I know you're the bee expert. You talked
about in your presentation that I attended, which
is wonderful, by the way, the Oregon Bee
Atlas. Did you have something to do with

(20:31):
that?
Yeah. So I'm
the the master melatologist
certification
program is actually,
associated with the organ bealis.
Okay. So, in order to hit different levels
of certification,
you,
you study,
you know,
and then

(20:52):
at the same time, you're working with the
Bee Atlas. The Oregon Bee Atlas
is out across the state of Oregon. We've
got volunteers
that go out and collect bees,
all throughout the season
and register
what kind of plant they're on.
And then
we take them back to our homes

(21:14):
and try to identify them as best we
can
down to either genus or species level
on the bee, which can be quite
demanding for, you know, an amateur. So you
can spend maybe I mean, I've spent, you
know, more than four hours
working on trying to figure out one bee
to species and just threw my hands up

(21:36):
in the air and said,
oh, well.
You know, the let me Xerces,
I went on that web now that's x
e r c e s, I believe.
And I was looking at perusing some of
that and the research there, the people that
do that, that's some arduous
it's I wouldn't call it sexy, like, if

(21:56):
you're out there looking at blue whales or
something, but it's very important to what we
do.
And it that looks like some pretty tough
research for people to and throughout the year,
they do that in Yeah. Ungodly weather, I'm
assuming.
It's really difficult.
I can't speak from, you
know, my own experience, but just

(22:17):
reading on, you know, some of the things
they have to do. If you if you
think about a bee that's nesting
in the ground,
and let's say a solitary bee, they're not
harmful. They're not gonna sting in unless you
squeeze it between your fingers.
You know, they've got a little entrance that's
maybe the size of a pencil eraser,
or less,
little hole in the ground.

(22:38):
And that
burrow may go down a foot, two feet,
depending on the soil conditions and things like
that. And then there's gonna be a bunch
of little branches off of that where they
create cells
and they go and collect pollen.
They make a pollen mass in the cell,
lay an egg, close that off, and that's

(23:00):
that'll be one
one bee sometime in the future. And they'll
make more cells and more cells. They might
make one cell a day on average if
you look across all the bees.
And so, yeah, there's
now how do you study that? So how
do That was my question. And so you
look in these books and and you see
pictures of what these look like underground,

(23:21):
well, what they do is they take it
like a liquid
solution that solidifies
plaster of Paris or something,
pour it down and let it seep down
in there
and harden and then excavate that all out.
And then you've got the model of what
that looks like.
One guy,
really famous beesignist named Michener,

(23:43):
he he and another guy created this thing
where they were actually have a you remember
that ant nest where you look you have
look between two hands of glass? Oh, had
a couple of those. So he figured out
a way Mom didn't like them. But Way
to do something similar with ground nesting bees.
They actually had to, you know, crawl in
through a a little space

(24:04):
using a red light so they didn't get
distracted
and see and and observe what's going on.
You know, how do you know what is
going on in the life cycle of these
bees if you can't watch it? Yeah. Sometimes
I'll stick a little up
what? Ophthalmic
scope. There's little scopes. I don't remember the
proper name of those things
down

(24:24):
there and look at things.
So, yeah, really tough stuff to do. And,
well, every now and then, I'll see something
of I don't know. Maybe sitting outside, I
see a little tiny bug
that I can barely
see,
like a flea or a very little spider.
And I'm saying,
this animal has a name.

(24:46):
Somebody has studied this thing. Maybe he did
a PhD
dissertation
on
on this little bug, and there's so damn
many of them.
I'm sure a lot of them really are
not classified. Is that right, Ethan? Oh, yeah.
I I forget.
So
typically,

(25:06):
if I can remember correctly, they they'll say,
okay, we've got
somewhere around a million described
described insects,
meaning that somebody
put them under a microscope,
noted all the subtle little differences between this
particular insect
and a close relative.

(25:27):
And so there there's some work that goes
into that. And so they'll say, you know,
we've got, you know, probably a million something
described insects,
but we think there's five times or 10
times as many still waiting to be described.
And with climate change going on,
you know, one of the things people are
concerned about is we're gonna lose things before

(25:48):
we ever knew they were there.
Oh, thank you for that because doing on
the Xerces
site
now I might have this wrong. I think
I have it right. They were they named
Xerces after a blue butterfly, I think, that
is now extinct. Right. Yeah. So that Is
that correct? Yeah. So that's the Xerces blue
Okay. Butterfly. Which look beautiful.

(26:10):
And,
blues are pretty common. We've got, you know,
Fender's blue around
in in Oregon and and various others.
But that one, yeah, went extinct due to
development activities
on the
in San Francisco North North Peninsula area. Oh,
well, there's plenty of development there. That's Yeah.

(26:30):
So that fifty years ago, a little over
fifty years ago is the last time it
was seen flying. I'll be darned.
Yeah. And so these extinctions, they they go
on all that. I mean, there's always been
extinctions. What's important is what the rate of
extinction is. Because now we've got this really
bumped up rate of extinction.
And, you know, these things are going on.

(26:50):
We don't know they're going on.
Yeah.
And again, at your presentation, we talked a
little bit about I think as we humans,
we're too I think we're too quick. If
something doesn't if something bugs them, they're gonna
kill it. They wanna kill it right away.
And you talked a little bit about,
the bug zappers, things that we do. Those
bug zappers are horrible.

(27:11):
Well, I wasn't really aware until you like
you said, it really doesn't kill
enough of the bad let's say mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes are not attracted to light. Okay. Well,
there we go. Yeah. And not not a
good thing to do for people that really
want a a garden or to help the
pollinators along. That's right. So, you know, I
I don't remember the exact numbers, but,

(27:33):
you know, the people
they they did a study and they put
these zappers out and
it was some tiny fraction of a percent
of the kill was actually mosquitoes.
Mhmm. There's all these other, you know,
harmless
and or beneficial
kind of things out there. Moths, I guess,
big in the beginning. Yeah. Moths. Exactly. Okay.

(27:55):
Which, you know, could be helping us out.
And in Alaska, we had, I guess, they're
everywhere that there's a lot of mosquitoes we
could buy.
This gadget, I guess you'd call it, that
burns
a a propane flame,
which creates carbon monoxide,
which is what attracts the mosquitoes. And then

(28:17):
there would be a fan,
creating a negative pressure, and it would suck
all the mosquitoes into
a little bag. And at the end of
a period of time, you had a a
huge bag full of mosquitoes. Didn't do a
damn thing for the population. You still couldn't
sit outside.
Yeah. But it it killed a bunch of
them. Yeah. So
No. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. I was just

(28:38):
so before, you know, moving on to
some of the things that we can actually
go out and do, I just wanna say,
when we look across this spectrum of beneficial
insects, pollinators, etcetera,
Just a couple of other things that I
did not mention
is, you know, there we get more from
them,
besides ecosystem balance in our our yards, we

(29:00):
get, you know, decomposition
service,
Really important. So
flies and,
certain millipedes and different things,
they're earthworms. They're decomposing things all the time.
And then the food web.
You know, 95%
of terrestrial birds

(29:21):
rely on
insect larvae or insects at some stage of
their lifetime.
Oh, okay. Wow. And you know, you probably
know that bird populations have declined.
I think the bird counts,
I shouldn't start this because I can't pull
out the number. But over the last fifty
years,

(29:42):
Audubon, I I think bird counts
are down
around 30%
or something like that.
For some pretty ugly numbers. And Yeah. You
know, the grass eat it, the grass
bird land type birds, the seed eaters,
they're they've been fairly stable in the counts.

(30:03):
And it's the insectivores
Okay. Or that rely on insects at some
stage that are getting hammered.
So, you know, there's there's also this food
web component.
So it's, you know, critical to have these,
lower level animals,
kind of the base of the food webs
in many cases. And so here we are
come in fall and, you know, the beautiful

(30:25):
colors and I
where I came from, it was it was
almost a leave it to beaver suburban
green lawn. When the when the leaves fall,
rake those babies up and,
get rid of them.
I think
you were talking about it one time, is
it just better to try to leave the
leaves there
and not rake them up? Or don't they

(30:47):
provide a lot of sustenance and living conditions,
if you will, for a lot of preachers
that we need?
Well, yeah. You're you're absolutely right.
And and I'm gonna get to that Okay.
If if I can just delay a little
bit because that that is actually the next
kind of thing I I wanna get into.
Okay.
But I I wanna just, you know, emphasize

(31:08):
that
what can we do to help? Well, it's
complicated. It is really complicated.
You know, I believe you've gotten a little
bit of flavor for that because there's a
hell of a lot more going on than,
you know,
what I've talked about.
So,
you know, we can have these animals at

(31:29):
any life stage. You know, what do we
do? Well, luckily, there's, you know, organizations,
you know, Xerces Society is one and there's
others that they've got teams of people that
have been working for years. You know, Xerces
has been around fifty years,
Working and putting together,
campaigns to

(31:49):
teach people
what it is they can do to help
out.
And one of those,
you know, we've we've had a lot of
focus on wildlife friendly gardening in the last
few years. And that usually revolves around, you
know, putting the right flowers.
If you pay attention, you know, a lot
of it's about, you know, this kind of

(32:09):
flower, that kind of flower.
Make sure they're there from spring until fall.
And that's all good.
But that's only one piece of what it
takes to support an entire life cycle
of insects.
And
so, as you know, adults and larvae both
need food.

(32:30):
You know, things like butterflies and moss,
we know they're very specific in terms of
larval food for their caterpillars.
They need sites where they can,
you know, build a nest
and, you know, lay eggs if that's what
they do because not everybody builds a nest.
You know, butterflies, they just

(32:51):
lay eggs on the back of a leaf
and fly away.
A lot less work that way. They just,
you know, drop off the eggs and say
good luck and, you know, head on next.
And then you've got others that are really
guarding their brood,
you know. So different levels of parental,
influence that way.
And butterflies and moths, they need a place

(33:13):
to pupate.
Those pretty chrysalis that you see for like
a monarch butterfly. Yeah.
They've gotta hang somewhere.
Yeah. They need a place for that.
And they need sheltering sites because they've got
to evade predators,
you know.
I said that they're part of the food
web but they don't really want to be
part of the food web necessarily.

(33:34):
And so they're gonna, you know, wanna try
to hide somewhere.
And
this time of year, we've got leaves. So
you brought that up. And one of the
campaigns that the Xerces Society has is called
Leave the Leaves.
And,
you know, the benefits to doing that,
first of all, you know, leaves are a

(33:55):
good source of organic material
for your yard.
And, you know, they make a really nice
mulch.
Bumblebees,
will overwinter.
Some species, bumblebee,
will overwinter in leaves.
They'll burrow themselves in the leaves and just
stay there.

(34:16):
Around here,
it's so warm. In fact, some
bumblebees
don't go into true hibernation.
But nonetheless, you know, as a general statement,
they use that.
And then these ground beetles that I talked
about that are such voracious,

(34:36):
predators
that are going after slugs and snails and
things,
they use that leaf litter that's on the
ground. And so, you know, we've got various
beetle larvae that are in there, something called
springtails that are little
tiny little animals that jump,
I forget how, like a 100 times their

(34:57):
size
because they've got a spring loaded tail basically.
You know, mites and pill bugs, these things
are doing decomposition
for us.
And
there was a study done
in Maryland,
a two year study where they looked at
the impact of leaf removal.
And
what they found is

(35:19):
if you had a site where you took
the leaves off
this is a patch of ground, basically,
you know,
a one square yard patch of ground. You
take the,
leaves off one
square and leave them on the other. They're
side by side, so it's a it's a
good comparison. They did this across multiple suburban

(35:40):
yards.
And what and then the next spring,
and it may have may have started in
the end of winter or something, but they
put
something called an emergence trap
up on top. And then basically, they collect
every insect that comes out of that Mhmm.
And identify it.

(36:00):
And, you know, it's painstaking work. But what
they found is that
compared to a place where you left leaves
and then looking at one where you didn't,
the emergence of moths and butterflies
was down about 50%.

(36:20):
Beatles were down 25%.
Something called
ichneumonid
wasp, they're kind of a parasitic wasp,
that are beneficial in control and things. They
were down, you know, over 50%.
And then spiders down,
like, by 67%.

(36:40):
Now, you know, some people
listening might say, oh, good.
Well I don't like spiders. I'm gonna get
rid of all my leaves. But gotta bear
in mind that spiders have got a really
important role. Huge. And they have a huge
the the big role right now is
is building a web between any place I
can walk and my yard.

(37:02):
I can't it's a good it's a good
thing I'm I'm I can maintain control because
I often have one,
crawling on my chest because I've walked into
the middle of its web. But
Yeah. So well, go ahead. No. No. No.
No. No. I as a kid, I was
pretty big arachnophobe,
if you wanna say it. But I've learned
to really love them and their webs are

(37:22):
beautiful. And I know, Ray, it's, I hope
there's never a camera when I walk into
a web because that's pretty embarrassing,
but they are
hugely beneficial.
Right. So have you seen jumping spiders? You
know what that are? I do.
There's a big,
hobby of keeping them as pets. So are
these are the small little furry ones. Right?
Yeah. They're almost iridescent.

(37:44):
Yeah. They can be. Yeah. And they Yes.
And I I love jumping spiders. I do
too. We had them in Austin
and, you know, you go
one was on top of the table one
time
and, you know, I'm sitting there
looking at it and it's looking at me
waving his little they call him pedipal Yes.
Petal arms. Yes.
Waving those arms at me. And then I

(38:05):
walked over to one side a little ways
and he went and
turned his little body around and followed me.
Pretty observant. And like it was trying to
You could you could not believe that they're
not intelligent. Exactly. Yeah.
And if you
where I've seen them kept as pets, they
have a, you know, like a little glass
terrarium type thing, but they don't they take

(38:26):
them out, and they allow them to walk
around and everything, and they get them put
them back and
I'm always excited when I see a, a
jumping spider
on my deck.
So anyway so going back to this campaign,
leave the leaves.
But
this you know, you don't do this in
a vacuum
and use common sense. So, you know, what

(38:46):
we're not saying, you know, don't block your
don't block your drains.
You know, if they're on a sidewalk or
something where they get slippery when they get
wet, don't have them there.
And certainly, if you've got any plants that
are diseased
that, you know, say you've had some kind
of a disease outbreak on a tree
or shrub or something like that. Well, those

(39:08):
leaves,
this is just good gardening. You want to
rake those up,
put them in a bag,
and put them in the trash is what
you wanna do. So you wanna spread that
disease,
those pathogens. Are you talking about a
suburban lawn where you would leave the leaves
and that doesn't harm

(39:30):
the the grass over the winter? Well, okay.
So if you look at an area like
grass,
the suggestion would be to leave a light
layer.
Mhmm. Okay. Otherwise, it's just gonna cut all
the light out and kill the grass. But
you do leave a light layer there.
And if it's under a tree where those
leaves, you know, that's gonna be happening already

(39:51):
that's under a tree.
It'll get some light, obviously,
in the wintertime when the leaves drop if
if it's deciduous.
But,
so light on a lawn.
But look at, say, a hedge or bushes
that you have in
a bed.
There, you can go with a little bit

(40:12):
heavier layer.
And,
you know, that that would be a place
to rake leaves into. Mhmm. Let's say you've
got an area in the back of the
house that, you know, people aren't seeing from
the street or something like that. You know,
you you can be creative. Yeah. Just be
use your common sense when you're doing it.
Well, that they're natural,

(40:32):
mulch. Oh, yeah. They're great mulch. Yeah. You
know? Okay. Because I remember I worked part
time for Lowe's when I was after I
retired in during the spring, and I can't
my god. The amount of mulch and bark
that came in pallets upon pallets that were
loading.
And I I kinda wondered at times because
about jeez. I wonder if they just left

(40:53):
the leaves that are falling from their trees
on a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah. And and, you know, certainly don't shred
the leaves.
When I mean, I I can't honestly imagine
that somebody would think that it'd be a
good idea to rake them up, shred them,
and then put them back with they where
they are. Oh, I see. Don't do that.
Okay.

(41:14):
Okay. You know? Doesn't that get Well, it's
gonna get them to decompose quicker or if
you're putting them in compost? It will. But
then
what about things that are, you know, say,
a moth a moth cocoon that's
wrapped up in one of those leaves? Because
they'll do that. The silk moss will actually,
you know, bind those leaves together and you

(41:35):
won't see them. And they can be fairly
large cocoons on some of those things.
And ground beetles can get, you know, pretty
large. So I mean, you're gonna be killing
some stuff if you do that.
Now, if you do it in the spring
though,
right, the fall of the spring because what
we're talking about is preparing for overwintering here.
Okay.

(41:56):
And so
the
study that was done, it was looking at
emergence in the springtime. So after that,
you know, you can do whatever you want
with the leaves. It's the smartest thing to
do would be somehow retain them,
for mulch, etcetera. And, yeah, at that time,
it might make sense to shred them,

(42:16):
if they're large leaves.
Yeah.
Yeah. I used to shred them, but I
don't anymore,
because I didn't have a a a border
on my driveway. Now I have a a
block wall that's about a foot high, and
I can just walk along and blow the
leaves over that and eventually, I'm building up
more soil behind

(42:36):
that that wall. Right. So
I guess I'm giving
little bugs a ride with the blower, but
I don't think No. That's probably not hurt.
Upsetting the population too much.
And and, you know, sometimes people are reluctant
to
leave leaves,
behind in places because they're worried about, you
know, what are the neighbors gonna think,

(42:59):
etcetera.
And
And so one suggestion there is just signage.
And you can go to the Xerces site.
And I'm sure you can go to other
sites, but it's just I'm most familiar with
that as an ambassador for them.
And, you know, you can purchase a sign.
You know, part of that money goes to
them and it'll you know, it's got a

(43:19):
nice picture, leave the nice graphic, leave the
leaves on there. And, you know, you put
that out in your yard. It kinda
explains a little bit about what you're doing.
It's just like, you know, my yard,
it gets a little, shall we say, unkempt,
because I'll let things grow in the lawn
over the summer.
And spring. I'll let the flowers other people

(43:41):
call them weeds, but their flowers Let's just
grow. And so but I've got a a
sign out front that says, you know, pollinator
habitat. So, you know, people maybe get a
clue about
why that stuff is there. And and I
think that old adage about I I go
back to the leave it to be for
days, whatever you wanna call it, of the
nice manicured, beautiful green, deep green lawn, especially

(44:03):
where I came from Central California.
Drought conditions are just becoming
terrible. We were, always having
water issues,
and they were trying to tell people to
probably take some of take the lawns out
and go to another more natural, whatever you
wanna call it. That you don't have to
mess with and cut all the time. Well,
that too. Yeah. But and then, of course,

(44:24):
then we get into the, pesticide thing, putting,
whatever,
not mulch. I'm trying to think of the
stuff that supposedly makes the grass grow. I
can't think of the word. But a lot
of that stuff had some harmful chemicals. Yeah.
This you're talking about the synthetic fertilizers that
That kind of stuff. People are adding. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. Right.

(44:44):
Yes. I'm I'm glad you brought up lawns.
I wasn't really
planning to talk about that, but, I can't
resist saying a few words.
So, you know, lawns.
Yeah. This is this thing that we inherited
from
our colonial
ancestry. Right?
That's what, you know, that was the right
thing to do because that's what they, you
know, did over in England and

(45:06):
various places.
But, you know, we have
40 to 50,000,000
acres
of lawn
in this country. That's
a state that that equivalent of the state
of, say, roughly North Dakota.
Oh, wow.
And,
you know, it's unproductive.

(45:29):
It's for beauty or well Yeah. When I
sold my house on Long Island, I swore
that I would never have
a lawn again as long as I live.
I used to spend a good part of
the year fertilizing
and
cutting and raking and doing all sorts of
things, and then the fertilizer just made the
grass grow. So then I had to spend
a lot more time cutting,

(45:50):
and it was just insane. I said, I'll
never do this again, and I haven't had
a lawn since.
I have
parts of my lead that I cleared.
It was it was just all overgrown with,
with, berry bushes and stuff, and and now
it sits there.
No lawn. I refuse to put I'm not
sure what to do with it.

(46:13):
I think I'll plant an orchard or something
there.
And part of the you're talking about, how
about these huge sod farms that that's all
they have? Mhmm. I've seen truckload you know,
in in when they start to build a
new neighborhood, it happened down in where I
came from, Sacramento
area. God, these trucks pull in with just
these big rolls of nice beautiful green sod.
And,

(46:34):
is there really a benefit to that other
than the
beauty, whatever you wanna call it? Well, it's
a benefit to them. Well Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Yeah. Right.
The guys that are growing it.
You know,
for me personally, I'd say no. Zero. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. But if that's part you know,

(46:54):
it's a free country. If that's part of
what, you know, you think makes a beautiful
yard, then
there's a benefit there. But,
it's just nice to keep in mind the
fact that we've
we have lost so much
what could be good habitat
to this kind of thing. You know, why
not I gave a talk up in,

(47:17):
Corvallis, I guess it was, and
talked about lawns as one of the things
in there. And
after that talk, I got a little note
from one of the people that was there
and said she finally convinced her husband
to take out half of the lawn.
Yeah. After he saw the presentation,
they both watched it.

(47:37):
And
so it doesn't have to be an all
or nothing.
Get rid of 10%. Get rid of 25%
and put in some native plants or something
like that. That was a nice thing about
Tucson. It had native yards
or, you know, they were groomed and and
all that type of
grass wasn't very common. It was all

(47:59):
the the natural Natural desert landscape, I Yeah.
I'm assuming.
Right.
And
in the other thing they were doing in
my neighborhood, which I didn't like, they were
taking out the lawns and putting in
fake lawns,
green
I'm not quite sure that's gonna be a
benefit to anybody. What's that gonna look like

(48:20):
in a few years? Well and you know
what the weird part was? We were having
water shortages.
The people that put in the fake lawns
kept their sprinklers going. And That's insane. Anyway,
that is insane. It was a little bit
of an anomaly, but, yeah, that was crazy.
And I'm also glad,
Dave, you you talked about weeds and wildflowers.
I sometimes I'll go by as oh, man.

(48:42):
Look at god. That's all the wildflowers in
somebody. Ah, they're a bunch of weeds.
But they're beautiful.
And,
I think they help the pollinators along because
Oh, they absolutely. What they're going to. You
know, I there there's some weedy
species. You know, one's called a bird's foot
trefoil, a nice little
yellow

(49:03):
bloom. It's
it's related to like vetches and clover and
that.
Another one called self heal. You probably heard
of self heal, a little purple.
Oh, okay. Flowers.
And clover, white clover, all those things considered
weedy
in a lawn.
But if you go to my yard in

(49:23):
And I've got just a small yard, but
you go to that front
in,
say, June,
just bumblebees
everywhere.
Right? You Yeah. And and so, hey, you
know,
they have a purpose. They have a role.
Now, I wanna just mention a couple more
things about leave the leaves.

(49:43):
Oh, nice.
Or one thing, really, is fire safety. You
know, know, if you live in a high
risk area, obviously,
follow the local guidance.
So, you know, don't pile a bunch of
leaves against the side of your house. Remember,
we said use common sense.
So, you
know, always keep that in mind.

(50:04):
Now,
another
campaign that Xerces has is called Save the
Stems.
And this is
another one that's fairly important
when it comes to things like nest sites
for,
native bees
and solitary wasps.
So

(50:24):
if you
look at plants, some of them, if you
go and cut the stem,
you'll see that
it's got a soft center to it.
They call it pithy or soft center.
And that's
soft enough that certain of our bees can
go
and dig and excavate down there

(50:44):
and then they will go
and use that
to lay their eggs in that. I'm not,
you know, gonna go through the whole process
of what it takes to build these cells.
But,
and you could maybe, depending on how long
that stem is, you could have 10 or
15,
bees that come out of that thing the
next year.
And again,

(51:06):
not again, but I wanna emphasize something here.
A lot of people
look at something like a yellow jacket and
say bees,
and they're not bees, they're wasps.
And they say, you know, they attacked me.
And the only bees that attack are

(51:29):
social bees
or social wasps
because they have got a colony
and they protect their
babies.
And so they've evolved
to actually have toxins in their sting
that are highly effective on mammals like us

(51:50):
because mammals are the things that like skunks
will go and find
a bumblebee nest in the ground
and scarf that thing down because it's got
a lot of protein and fat in it.
Oh, wow. And so they attack So it's
these social ones that live in groups.
Solitaries,
90%

(52:11):
of our bees are solitary bees.
Those things do not bother you. And, you
know, the same with the solitary wasp.
Now,
so
I just wanna make that point that, you
know,
don't confuse bees and wasps

(52:33):
and
recognize the fact that it's a very small
percentage of bees that will actually chase you
around. And for the most part, that's only
if you stumble on a bumblebee nest
or yellow jacket nest. Well, and again, yellow
jackets, they are they pollinators themselves?
They are. They're not as effective. I mean,
the adults will go and use nectar. Okay.

(52:54):
Bees are really effective pollinators because they're they're
gathering the pollen to feed. Okay. They're young.
The yellow jackets are pretty much carnivores. Right?
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. Almost all wasps are well,
wasps kind of break down in two categories.
They're either carnivores
or parasitic
wasp. Mhmm. Okay.

(53:15):
And then,
there's, you know, one weird little group of
wasp called pollen wasp that are kind of
like vegetarian wasp, like bees are.
But yeah.
So,
save the stem. So we wanna create these
nest sites for these bees that actually are
stem nesters.

(53:36):
You know, it's something like,
30% of the bees or something like that
are stem nesters.
And
the idea here, just in brief, because I'm
gonna talk about some resources and you can
find out more. But just in brief, what
you're doing is
at the end of the this time of
year, at the end of the bloom season,
instead of cutting the flowering stems back,

(53:58):
You,
leave the flowers on in the spring. You
cut them to certain heights and and there's
a resource that talks about that. Remember things
like rock walls,
rock piles, branches and things that you leave
out in your yard? This creates a, you
know, really great little habitat for these various
kinds of insects that we're talking about.

(54:19):
And you know, sometimes chaos
is a good thing.
And, you know, I've got a good bit
of chaos
in in my yard. That was my gardening
style.
Yeah. I mean, my wife says that says
tells me anyway it's chaotic.
But, you know, in all seriousness,
I don't have pest problems

(54:40):
and I don't use insecticides.
I mean, everything's under control. Wow.
So,
you know, there's something to this. We we
do a lot of pretty harmful stuff, don't
we, in our when I'm making our nice
green manicured
lawns and stuff. Yeah.
So,
just, I I guess, briefly, some resources I'd

(55:00):
just like to Sure. Put those out there.
So if you go to xerces.org,
xerces.0rg,
go to the home page,
you will see a little slideshow.
Various topics, one of them is leave the
leaves,
and we've got to save the stems

(55:21):
that
and that you you can get more information
there. Just click on those slides. And I
did that and I wanna tell everybody, even
for a non garden guy, it was pretty
interesting and pretty eye opening.
Yes. Yeah. And then there there's a tab
at the top of the page called resources
and you can go there and
see different things, learn about invertebrates, etcetera.
And there's just a lot of other information

(55:43):
there if you want it. Yeah.
Well, we are getting down to the nitty
gritty here, but I also want now, Dave,
you are a member also of our local
garden club. Right. And there's more resources for
people and
Yes. So,
the
the Brookings Harbor Garden Club, you can find,

(56:04):
on Facebook.
And
they're always looking for people that might be
interested to be members. You can go to
one of the meetings and, you know, potentially
sign up for that.
There's gonna be a harvest festival event, I
think, October 11, a Saturday.
Oh.
Coming up here, that'll be at the Botanical

(56:26):
Garden down there near
where 101,
crosses the river there Yeah. On the corner.
Can't think of the street coming in there.
Right? Right. Right by Azalea Park. Yeah. So
that's gonna be going on on October 11.
And, again, you could, you know, stop by
there
and find out more.
And I'll have a a Xerces table set

(56:46):
up there. Oh, great. So mark that down,
October 11.
Roughly what time it start?
I think 10:00. Okay. Ten to two or
something like that. Yeah.
Well, like I said, we're down to just
a couple minutes. Dave, anything else you wanted
to excitedly get out before we're out of
time? I know you had a a whole

(57:07):
list and I had more stuff to ask,
but, we're almost out of time. Well, I'll
just throw out one more
resource. There's something called Homegrown National Park Oh.
By a guy named Doug Tallamy. He's a
entomologist.
And if you,
you can Google Homegrown National Park or you
can go to homegrownnationalpark.org,

(57:27):
no hyphens or anything like that.
And, you know, his idea is that if
enough people
create habitat in their own yard, it can
be the equivalent amount of acreage as one
of our national parks.
Wow.
That's great.
Well, okay. I'd like to thank you again,
Dave. And even like I said, for a

(57:47):
non gardening guy like me, I I figured
out or found out a lot stuff that
I will even in my little tiny gardening
thing, I'll do differently.
But it's all it's very important stuff. Again,
we did be in touch on the the
food plants that we have, that we need
the pollinators for.
Gotta walk the the blackberry path right there

(58:08):
by the Smith River a lot, and what
a joy that is. You just pick up
for free all of the beautiful blackberries that
are there. All the all the good ones
are way back because I can't get, but
I know there's a way to the bears
do it. The the bears will open up
the paths to those. Oh, and we almost
forgot to mention it. It's fat bear week.
What is it? Yes. Fat bear week. Yeah.
I just found out. Okay, folks.

(58:29):
We're down to the last 30 thank you
again, Dave Colon.
Talk about,
gardening, pollinators,
and
all of that good stuff. And you all
have been listening to KCIW
LP
one hundred point seven FM
in beautiful Brookings, Oregon. And thanks for listening.
Thank you. Thank you, Dave. You're

(58:54):
welcome.