Flies in (and out of) Drag

Because of the recent and ongoing ruckus about honeybees and colony collapse disorder, I've been watching carefully for honeybees on the various flowering plants we've got outside this year. So far, not a one, though that might just mean we're not growing anything they find appealing.

There are plenty of other insects to look at, though. A few are even bees. They're just not honeybees.

Is there any plant that looks more like fireworks than dill does?
We sowed some dill seeds this year, because I was hoping to get swallowtail caterpillars and/or butterflies (also I just really like dill pickles, so now I can smell them all the time). Nothing so far, but I don't have much of a grasp of when swallowtail butterflies are supposed to be in Iowa in the first place.

What's appreciating the dill instead are mostly green bottle flies (Lucilia sericata). Which I suppose I don't mind, since nobody else was using it, and bottle flies do have their positive qualities, but this was hardly the original plan.

I should probably also note that we've used the dill once, in cooking. Turns out that there is in fact such a thing as too much dill.

The cilantro (Coriandrum sativum) that came with the house keeps popping up here and there; it's gotten moved at least two times so far, but every year, enough seeds manage to survive to keep the population going. We haven't done any cooking with it, despite having had it around for four years: I'm not particularly a fan (though I can understand why people could be), and really my main interest in it is visual: the clouds of little white flowers appeal to me.

"Morning, Ralph."
"Morning, Sam."
They're apparently also appealing to ants. I really like that picture. Something about their posture, or something.

Flies are also really fond of the Coriandrum flowers. I don't know what species this is, but they are everywhere this year. I see them all the time on the marigolds and Portulacas as well. I don't know the ID; I haven't even been able to come up with a general ballpark guess on an ID. They're flies of some kind, and that's as much as I can tell you.

Sometimes, I don't even know that the insects are there, when I take the picture. Like, I didn't see this until I uploaded the pictures to my computer:

Oh, what a nice picture of a flower OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT FUCKING THING GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY.
After some searching on-line, I've tentatively identified this as the larva of Coleomagilla maculata, the spotted lady beetle. This could be better news: C. maculata is allegedly capable of surviving almost entirely on pollen, so it's not necessarily helping me out that much with insect pests. Not that I've seen much in the way of insect pests this year. (A few whiteflies. No pictures of those yet.)

OTHER WAY! GO THE OTHER WAY!
There is at least one actual bee so far this year; I don't know which one it is. (I tried looking it up, but there are so many tiny bees in Iowa that I didn't even know where to start.)

They're not very picky, whatever they are. I think this is the same species, on Tagetes:

And maybe again on a dandelion:

But the insect I started this post to talk about is this last one.

Because it looked enough like a honeybee at first glance, I initially got excited about this, but the longer I looked, the more it seemed . . . not quite right. Once I'd uploaded the pictures to the computer, and had a chance to look around a bit, I concluded that, whatever it might be, it was definitely not a bee -- no pollen baskets on the legs, only one pair of wings, stubby antennae, huge eyes, and it didn't seem nearly fuzzy enough to be a bee.

After some research, I think the genus is probably Eristalis (hoverflies, drone flies). One of the more likely candidates for the species is E. tenax. Which seemed fine, until I read the Wikipedia entry for E. tenax. Now that I have, I'm kind of retroactively grossed out by it: I could have been perfectly happy not knowing that there was such a thing as a "rat-tailed maggot." No wonder it wants to dress up as something else.

Random plant event: Clivia 'Aztec Gold'

You may or may not remember last summer's Clivia blooms. I apparently never bothered to say, officially, that the blooms had turned into fruits (or at least some of them did; I wound up with about a dozen), but that happened too.

In mid-May, I noticed that one of the fruits had begun to change color, which was exciting, because it signified that they were about to be ripe enough to plant up. I figured I'd wait until they turned red, like they're supposed to, then start a bunch of seeds and have a ton of new plants to play with, finally. (The "finally" is because neither of my Clivias have ever offset.)

Except that it didn't turn red. So I left it on the plant. And then more of them started to change color, but they didn't turn red either. And so I worried. Maybe they're never going to turn red. Maybe something is wrong. It's probably just as well; I don't know what to do with them once they're ripe anyway. Easy come, easy go. Etc.

But then:

Yes, that's a root growing out of the berry. Apparently this is a thing that happens sometimes, with Clivia. So the game, such as it is, is back on again. (Not that it was ever off, but I didn't know that.)

And it turns out that yellow-blooming Clivias were always supposed to produce lighter-colored fruit than the regular orange-blooming ones:

Clivia with yellow flowers will produce yellow fruit, while Clivia with orange flowers will produce red fruit. (Ref.)

It's just that nobody had ever told me.

So now I guess I have some Clivia seeds to start. I'm not going to get too excited about this just yet, since a lot of what I'm seeing on-line about starting Clivia seeds makes them sound very susceptible to fungal diseases, and goodness knows we have some fungal diseases here. But, apparently we're further along in the process than I realized, so I'd best hurry and catch up.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Golden Crest

Not much to say. Paphiopedilum Golden Crest is Paphiopedilum fairrieanum x Paphiopedilum Wallcrest.

I'd be chattier, but I was up at about 4:30 AM yesterday, because a storm was rolling through and it was loud. I could have tried to sleep through it regardless, but I was worried about the plants outside -- the forecast had said there might be hail -- so I stayed up worrying about them until the storm had passed, even though there wasn't much I could have done to help them, had hail started to fall.

Hoping to get things together for some more substantial posts soon.

Random plant event: Phalaenopsis NOID

In March 2009, the husband and I went to Cedar Rapids and bought a NOID Phalaenopsis at Frontier Garden Center. I didn't want to, because I was pretty sick of Phalaenopsis by this point, but he paid for it, so okay, fine.

Then, five or six hundred years passed.

And now we have this:

How did this happen? I do not know. It just did.

Am I happy about it? I do not know. I think I'm confused? More than anything?

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

For a while yesterday, Google/Blogger wasn't letting me upload this photo (I tried three or four times), so you almost didn't get to see this. But I tried again after a few hours, because I care, so you do.

You're welcome.

Not really any Sheba news to speak of; she's been getting some hot spots over the last month or so, probably because it's been a terrible year for biting insects (I didn't even know what a buffalo gnat was until this year, and I've lived in Iowa about 75% of my life.) and she had existing allergies to something already, which have been coming and going for a long time. I don't think the spots at her elbows are hot spots: I think that's just how her hair grows.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Mini Snowflake

Gosh, you know, I thought after I got back from the orchid show and I was going through the photos I'd taken that this year's batch was pretty decent, but the last couple are making me rethink that.

In fairness, part of the reason why this picture isn't great is that I couldn't get close to the plant.

Not sure how I feel about Dendrobiums in general these days, but this one is impressively large and floriferous, so props to whoever grew it.

Dendrobium Mini Snowflake is Dendrobium aberrans x Dendrobium johnsoniae, for those keeping track.

Random plant event: Tagetes patula 'Durango Bee'

This is one of those things that I expect will be minor -- possibly even trivial -- to most of you, but it's new (more like "new") and exciting to me, so I'm blogging about it anyway.

When we first moved in here, I bought some 'Durango Bee' marigolds to plant, because . . . well, it's one of those cases where although I can see perfectly well why people might not like them, and sort of feel like I shouldn't like them much myself, I nevertheless enjoy them. It's kind of weird. (The flip side, not liking plants that everybody else thinks are awesome, happens to me a lot more often, it seems like.) At the end of the 2009 season, I collected a bunch of seeds, stored them over the winter, and then somehow neglected to try sowing them anywhere. So in 2011, I threw them all into an otherwise-unused spot, in hopes that maybe they'd do something even though they were old, and to my surprise, they did! And I posted about it at the time.

So then history repeated itself. I collected seeds in 2011, and then for some reason didn't do anything with them last year, so I scattered them into the Portulaca / Muscari bed on the off chance that they might sprout, not really expecting them to. Having already forgotten about the 2011 experience, I was then delighted when they unexpectedly came up again. And we've now hit the point where the first flower bud of the year has opened.

The main conclusion we can draw from this: there will probably be a post in June or July 2015 in which I excitedly announce that I've discovered Tagetes seeds can remain viable ~18 months after collection.

I should also probably note for my own records that the color doesn't coordinate with that of the Portulacas very well. I'm not bothered by it at the moment (we'll see how I feel once more of the Tagetes flowers open up), but they're too dark too look right, I think.

Music: "The Hymn of Acxiom (1st Draft Demo)" (Vienna Teng)

I ran into this last week sometime, through MetaFilter, and it's been on my mind a lot since then (not to mention getting stuck in my head: it's really quite catchy). Not only is it timely, given the recent revelations about the PRISM program and what the U.S. government's been doing with our phone records and on-line information, but for me, anyway, it's also perfectly balanced on that edge between being creepy as all fuck and being really gorgeous, depending on whether you're paying attention to the music (beautiful), the lyrics (beautifully and seductively creepy), or the implications of the lyrics (straight-up creepy).

The "Acxiom" of the title is a real marketing company. (You may never have heard of them, but they almost certainly know a lot about you.)

I hadn't heard of Vienna Teng before this, but she sounds like an interesting person, with roots in software development, music, and environmental studies. In one interview, she even mentions Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire) as an influence on her music ("The passages where he waxes rhapsodic about cooking or gardening are some of the loveliest bits of prose I’ve read."). So there's that connection, too.

Anyway. Let me know what you think.



Lyrics:

somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.
somebody hears you. you know that inside.
someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to
(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.
here you’re known.

leave your life open. you don’t have. you don’t have.
leave your life open. you don’t have to hide.
someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these
(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.
keep them all.

let our formulas find your soul.
we’ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),
marshal feed and force (our machines will)
to design you a perfect love—
or (better still) a perfect lust.
o how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.

now we possess you. you’ll own that. you’ll own that.
now we possess you. you’ll own that in time.
now we will build you an endlessly upward world,
(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.

is that wrong?
isn’t this what you want?
amen.

Various bits and pieces about Vienna Teng:

Vienna Teng (Wikipedia)
viennateng.com (her website)
How Can We Feed Our Creativity? (interview mentioned above)
Soundcloud page for "The Hymn of Acxiom"
Stanford Daily interview
MetaFilter post about "The Hymn of Acxiom"