Entomology

A sculpture by artist Pete Beeman depicts a Megarhyssa "stump stabber" wasp atop a microscope, symbolizing the entomology labs at the North Valley Complex facility. Photo by Samantha Swindler.

The North Valley Complex is in Wilsonville, Oregon, about 15 miles south of Portland.

Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future

Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future
AlphaPhoenix

This video is great, best thing I've seen in a while.

Screw You, Worm

Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms On Panama Every Week
Half as Interesting

The trouble with the news is you only hear about disasters, you never hear about the systems that are working properly. It's like the politicians and anyone who wants to influence policy gets up and starts screaming about something and 'the people', being easily panicked, panic and run screaming in whatever direction they are being herded, kind of like sheep. Huh. Psychopaths and morons, that's the way it's always been and likely the way it will always be.

COPEG N62V Beechcraft A90 King Air

N62V Recent Flight

The Atlantic has the same story, but it's a little calmer.

Locusts

It's the Matrix, but for locusts.
Tom Scott

I don't see how this research is going to help, but I guess that's what science is about. You go digging into something, trying to understand how it works and maybe you learn something useful. Maybe you don't, but you don't know unless you try.

If you've got your tinfoil hat on, you might notice that bugs 'marching in unison' is basically herd behavior, something that happens with many (all?) animals including humans. So this research into locust behavior is just the first step on the journey toward total mind control of all humans. Bwaa ha ha ha ha hah!

On the downside, there are bug farms now in operation that are growing zillions of bugs to feed any critter willing to eat them. I wonder how long it will be until one of these bug farms has a major breach and an escaped swarm devastates the surrounding area. Unlikely to be as devastating as a real swarm, but it will be enough to make the news and panic the easily panicked, which is the main goal of all media.

Via Ross and Harvard

Time flies like an arrow,

Fly Brain Imaged at Nanoscale Resolution
HHMI Howard Hughes Medical Institute

fruit flies like bananas. Talking to a neurobiology student last night. They're studying fruit fly brains. These brains have 100,000 neurons and it's pretty well understood how they work. That's for some value of 'pretty well'. This video is an easy introduction.

Murder Hornet

 

Murder Hornet and his gun

Sorry for the sad picture. I took a very nice one using the Magnifier app on my smart phone, but I neglected to press Save because why should I have to do that? I don't have to do it with the Camera app. Anyway, the good pictures vanished and I am left with this one. Those are centimeters marked off on the ruler so you can see how monstrous this bug is.

Actually the bug is what we used to call a 'sweat bee' back in Ohio. They are kind of odd. They show up occasionally, buzz around for awhile, never seem to land anywhere and never bite or sting anyone. Basically harmless. This one was lying on his back on the table waving his legs feebly.

Monarch Butterflies

Watch a Breathtaking Monarch Butterfly Swarm
Via MetaFilter, which has a couple more links.

Bees

  The Bees That Give You Almonds

Via Benjamin & Shelby - LA Times Newsletter.

Bug of the Day

Beetle
Just because it's the hugest picture of a beetle I have ever seen.

Bees

Been seeing a lot of bees around lately. In the backyard, there must have been two dozen on this one plant. Click to embiggen.

Then out at Larsen's Nursery Sunday, we saw some bumble bees

And honey bees and bumble bees in the same area.



The bumble bees are are the black ones in the foreground. The honey bees are harder to see. They are farther back and more of a light brown color.

Found the Bees

Dutiful daughter figured out where they were coming from. There is a little bump-out of the side wall of the house to accommodate the gas fireplace. It has it's own little roof. It's like a secret room, but there is no way in or out, except through the vents. I initially discounted this as the source of the bees we've been finding in the house because the vent from the fireplace is warm - the pilot light is on. I figured the bees wouldn't be going somewhere where it's hot. But now I realize that it has been getting cool at night, and they might find the pilot light very attractive.

Dead Bees

 They are not honey bees. I am not sure they are bees at all, they might be hornets. But over the last 4 or 5 days they have been showing up in the family room, flying around for a bit and then keeling over dead. There are a grand total of maybe 2 or 3 dozen. I have not found any others anywhere else in the house, and I haven't been able to figure out where they are coming from. A quick scan of the outside of the house didn't reveal anything. Seems like there are always one or two buzzing around the window, but they don't seem to last long, and they don't seem very energetic. It is really kind of weird.


Update February 2017 replaced missing pictures.

Bug for the Day

It's hard to get a good shot of a dragonfly. They are fairly big: they have a long body and long wings, but they are skinny, so you have to get close to get any detail. I didn't think this shot was too bad.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Denier

My daughter found a deal on some 500 thread count sheets at Marshal's. 500 TPI (Threads Per Inch)!?! That's crazy talk! That would mean each thread was less than two thousandths of inch (.002") in diameter. So I looked it up when we got home, and thread count is the sum of the number of threads in both directions, so it's only 250 TPI. Whew, had me worried there for a moment. But thread count is a rat hole that can consume the rest of your life. We don't want to go there. But while I was looking around I find this bit about Denier in Wikipedia:

Denier is a unit of measure for the linear mass density of fibers. It is defined as the mass in grams per 9,000 meters. . . . The denier has its standard based in nature, a single strand of silk is one denier. Therefore, a sampled 9,000 meters length of silk will weigh one gram.

Nine kilometers of silk weighs one gram! That's six miles! Un-fricking-believable! So I went looking for a picture of 9 km of silk fiber. Problem is it is really hard to get down to one fiber. Even the silk pulled directly from the cocoons of silk worms is multiple fibers. A single fiber of silk is from 5 to 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) in diameter.

Silk is made of protein, and proteins are made from amino acids, and amino acids are mostly made of Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Picking on Carbon, because everybody is always picking on Carbon, the diameter of a carbon atom is about 300 picometers (trillionths of a meter). So a single thread of silk is about 25,000 atoms wide. Hmmph. I would have thought fewer. I guess atoms are smaller than I thought.

Filature/Reeled Silk Yarn - 20-22 Denier

And then we have this little blurb:

The Tussah silk yarn is a newly designed color with a soft/low twist for 2009 Spring. It was made for a project in New York City fashion show, wonderful bright color and very smooth & soft hand. Our team was inspired by melt-down global economy, everywhere stimulus package, eco-friendly alternative energy and 2009 uncertainty.

Some people just really have a way with words. Snark, snark.

Update March 2016. Replace missing picture. [Old picture came from here.]

Update May 2023. Link in previous update message pointed to [silkindian dot com] which generated a security warning from Blogger. 

Quote of the Day

“They are the lawn mower of the prairie. The biggest biomass consumers on the North American prairie are grasshoppers — not cattle, not bison, not antelope.” - Helmuth Rogg, entomologist for the Oregon Department of Agriculture

From a story on the front page of yesterday's Oregonian.