Got allergies? Don't blame the goldenrod!

It's mid-September and the goldenrod is now in full bloom -- right about the same time that the pollen count hits the roof.  Over and over, I hear people blaming their hay fever on goldenrod.   But they are wrong!  Read on...

A field of goldenrod on my land in Minnesota --
haven for many butterflies & other insects

 Everyone can see the bright yellow of a field of goldenrod plants in full bloom.  As they look at all those yellow flowers along the road, they visualize clouds of pollen choking the air.  Just the sight of it all is enough to make some people sneeze.

But the fact is, goldenrod pollen is not spread by the wind at all.  This is why weather reports that include a pollen count never even mention goldenrod as a source.

A Goldenrod flower

Don't believe me?  See for yourself: Touch a goldenrod flower and you will not have any pollen on your hands.  Shake one and you won't see any clouds of pollen hitting the air.  It just doesn't blow around.   It spreads by sticking to the bodies of insects.  Unless you are a bug with lots of tiny hairs on your body to pick up the pollen, it doesn't leave the plant very easily.  Ecologically speaking, Goldenrod is an important nectaring flower for wasps, bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects.  So please -- don't yank it out!

Ragweed plant in full bloom

The real culprit is ragweed, a coarse weedy green plant that blends into the background in fields and woodland edges.  Unlike the showy flowers of goldenrod, the rather nondescript flower stalks of ragweed are just loaded with pollen, and it does indeed spread on the wind.

Ragweed is not particular about habitat, and will grow just about anywhere.  The plant in this photo grew next to my compost pile, so it got to be over 6 feet tall from all that rich chicken manure.  Along the road you might see flowering ragweed only about a foot high, eking out an existence in the hard-packed gravel on the shoulder.  But once you learn to recognize it, you'll see it growing just about everywhere.

(Well, maybe not in the high desert -- but it crops up in irrigated areas like Las Vegas.  In fact, according to The 30 Worst Cities for Ragweed, Las Vegas ranks #2.  The top city on the list is Phoenix, Arizona.)

The stuff is very easy to pull up, so if you learn to to recognize it before it pollens out, you can at least eliminate it from your garden.  But with all the acres and acres of wild areas where it can flourish, you will probably have to wait until frost kills the plants before your "hay fever" finally goes away for the season.  Just don't blame your misery on the innocent goldenrod!

Typical distribution of ragweed pollen in
the USA in September

A beautiful pink and white spider!

"Even things you see as superfluous in this world -- like flies, fleas, and mosquitoes -- are part of the greater scheme of the creation of the world.  'And God saw all that God had created, and behold it was very good.'" (Midrash Exodus Rabbah 10:1)

For many people, including the words "beautiful" and "spider" together in the title of this blog post would be an oxymoron.  Spiders are often seen as ugly and even fearsome creatures.  But for those who can get beyond their arachnophobia, some spiders can indeed be attractive.  Consider this pretty spider I spotted on a milkweed plant in my garden. (Click photos to enlarge):

I had never seen a spider like this before, and was amazed at how the pink stripes on her (yes, it is a female) abdomen exactly match the color of the flowers.  I could not find this species in any of my nature books, so I googled "pink and white spider" and immediately found this page on a spider website that not only identified the species, it gave me a lot of other interesting info.  Turns out my pink and white spider is nothing rare.  The species is very widespread and often found on a variety of flowers. There were many, many more sites where people asked or wrote about this interesting spider.

The scientific name is Misumena vatia, and it a variety of crab spider, known as both a Milkweed Flower Crab Spider and a Yellow Goldenrod Crab Spider, among several other names.  This is one of the few North American spiders that can change its color to match its surroundings -- an arachnid chameleon!   After reading this, I remembered that I had seen similar spiders on goldenrod flowers, but they were yellow.  Now I know they are the same species.

This is a "wait and pounce" type of spider that does not spin a web.  Instead, it sits quietly on flowers, blending in and waiting for something to land.  When I checked back a few hours later, the spider was still there and feeding on a yellow jacket wasp that she had caught.

Which brings me to another nature observation.  This summer, I have not seen a single honeybee anywhere on my land.  Not one!  As you may already know, the honeybees are facing a serious health crisis and are dying out by the droves.  Years ago I used to stand under my apple trees when they were in bloom and hear a constant, busy humming as the bees did their work.  But no more.  This year, the fruit trees were silent. 



Hornet on milkweed

However, I am still getting pollenation on my flowers and vegetables.  The niche has been taken over by various other insects, including paper wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, flies,  moths, butterflies, and a variety of species of bumblebees.

This is why I do not remove wasp nests unless they are in a spot where they might be a problem for animals or humans -- such as right over a door way.  Otherwise, I leave them alone.  To those visitors who complain about wasps flying around, I reply that these are the insects responsible for pollenating the vegetables we harvest.  Plus they are insect predators, removing a lot of destructive caterpillars from the garden.  Really, the wasps and hornets are more beneficial that bothersome -- and if you don't bother them, they won't bother you.

Stirring up a hornet's nest -- literally!

Over the years, I have stirred up plenty of symbolic hornet's nests with my controversial stances on various issues -- but this time I did it for real.  OK, they were really Yellow Jackets, the smaller cousins of the Bald-faced Hornet -- but they get just as angry when you disturb their nests.

Yellow Jackets coming out of
an underground nest (Photo courtesy of
South Texas Nature Images on Flikr)

Of course I didn't do this on purpose -- nobody does that!  A couple days ago the wind took down a paper birch tree, and I needed some nice sticks for an upcoming Cub Scout craft project that my grandson's Pack is planning to do.  (Since I have a wood lot, it falls to me to provide a lot of the natural materials.)  I thought the white birch bark would look nice, so this morning I went out to cut off some of the branches -- and unwittingly stepped into the nest.

Yellow Jackets usually nest in the ground, often using an old rabbit hole or other tunnel, so they are very hard to see until it is too late  This one was covered by the crown of the fallen tree.   I was so intent on choosing and cutting my salvaged branches that I did not notice the wasps until a swarm was buzzing around me.

Luckily I was wearing heavy pants tucked into my boots, in preparation for tromping through underbrush in the ditch where the tree fell.  Good thing, because those little buggers grabbed onto the cloth of my pants and really hung on -- if I had been wearing shorts, I would have had stings all over my legs.  As it was, I only got 3 on my arms and one on my face as I high-tailed it out of there.  (This is why I'm always telling people NOT to wear shorts in the woods.   Sure it's hot wearing long pants -- but even worse getting scratched up or stung!)

While on the subject of Yellow Jackets, you may notice that there seem to be a lot more of them around your picnic table in the fall.  This is because during the summer they feed their young on insects, so they don't have much interest in your bottle of pop or your jelly roll.  But in the fall, after the new queens have flown and the colony starts to break up, the worker wasps switch to a sugary diet -- and start buzzing around your outdoor events.  Suddenly it seems as if the population has exploded overnight.  I myself have noticed a lot more of them around my hummingbird feeders lately -- and now I know where they are all coming from!  But really, they have been increasing steadily all summer, you just don't see many until fall.

Unlike honey bees, wasp and hornet colonies don't winter over.  The new queens fly and mate, then find a place to hibernate for the winter.  The rest of the wasps die off  with the cold weather.  So, after we get a few hard frosts, I'll be able to return to that tree and safely salvage some birch sticks.

Why was this hornet's nest so close to the ground?

Now that the leaves are all down, you can sometimes spot interesting things that were hidden during the summer.  Like this Bald-Faced Hornet's nest that has its opening less than a foot above the ground, which is probably why I couldn't find it earlier in the summer.   I knew there were hornets around because I saw them, but I was looking UP into the treetops, where these nests usually are.  And here there was a nest less than 30 feet from my chicken coop and practically ON the ground -- not more than six feet from where I was harvesting wild plums!  I probably walked past that nest dozens of times and never even knew it was there.  I didn't bother them and they didn't bother me.

Bald-faced Hornet

This is the second time I've found a very low nest on my land -- the first was only about 3 feet off the ground, near another outbuilding.  There are plenty of trees around here to nest in, so I am wondering:  Do hornets often build so low, or do I have an unusual strain of these insects breeding here?  Hornets only use the nest for one season, after which they all die off except the new queens, who hibernate over the winter, producing new colonies in the spring.  So it is conceivable that some mutation is causing queens here to nest low.  I'll have to watch for more low nests next spring.

Before I go any further, I should mention that there is NO HONEY in a nest like this, in spite of what Hollywood might think.  In both cartoons and live action films (such as in Doctor Doolittle 2, where a bear climbs up to a nest for honey) hornet's nests are mistakenly confused with old-fashioned garden beehives.  Climb up to one of these nests and all you will get is a bunch of stings, because hornets don't make honey.  They are predators that feed their larvae on  insects.

Back of my coop -- the lighter areas
are where the hornets scraped off
wood fibers for their nest.

Where were the hornets getting their wood fibers to make this nest?  From the back of my chicken coop, where they scraped the bare weathered wood clean.  I've seen this behavior here before, both with hornets and wasps, but wasn't paying much attention this summer because of the heat wave.  It wasn't until I found the nest that I went to look at the coop.  You can very clearly see the lighter areas where they were working (click the pix to enlarge).

Interestingly, they seem to follow the vertical lines of the boards.  In cases where I have actually seen hornets doing this, they are always clinging vertically, never horizontally. Most likely, they are following the grain of the wood.  And if you listen very closely, you can actually hear them chewing.  In fact, the first time I observed this behavior many years ago, it was by first hearing a strange scraping sound, looking for the source, then seeing a hornet busily chewing along a dead goldenrod stalk.

In this closeup,  you can clearly see where they left off and the patina of the old wood (darker area on the left) still shows.  When you look at the nest itself, you also see variations in the color of the paper, with clear stripes from both the dark and light areas.  This suggests to me that each wasp goes back to the same part of the coop wall, gets a load of fibers, then returns to the same area on the nest.  But since I have not actually observed this, it is only guesswork.

All of this brings up the question of where wasps and hornets get their wood fibers in developed areas.  An old weather-worn shack like my chicken coop would never be tolerated in more upscale neighborhoods.  Ditto for dead trees and other suitable debris.  Maybe they use wooden fences?  I have seen photos of nests that are more reddish in color, as if made from redwood.

Hornets, along with their cousins, the paper wasps, are very good for the garden -- which is where the inhabitants of this nest were hunting all summer.  I watched them searching among the broccoli and cabbage leaves for those little green caterpillars.  When they find one, they sting it and carry it back to their nest.  Ditto for army worms and other pests, including flies, which can be found in abundance around the coop and manure pile. Plus, both hornets and wasps visit flowers to eat pollen and nectar, and seem to be moving into the niche that has been vacated by honey bees around here.  I only saw two honey bees all summer, but lots of wasps were on the flowers, and we got a good harvest.  So unless the nests are someplace dangerous to me or my animals, I leave these very beneficial insects alone.   Besides, they give me an excellent reason NOT to paint the chicken coop!

Closeup of the nest after I collected it, showing the
variations of colors of wood pulp used.