Happy Tuesday: A Good Weekend

Maple Hill Road, Barton, Vermont
Sunday, September 25, 2022
The mountain in the background is Owl's Head in Québec
The farm raises beefalo. 

This is the road I take to Orleans Village to see Jody and to go to church. On Saturday, I did both: the Women's Fellowship had its Fall Fling and Jody went with me. The church is across from her house. We entered the raffles and we each won! I got my Pioneer Woman Mini Dutch Ovens (which are stainless, not cast iron), and Jody won a peanut butter bird feeder. I got a bag of doughnuts, also.

Jody's bird feeder

My mini Dutch ovens

After the fair, and after Jody had tended to the potatoes in the church garden that she created and manages, we went across the road to her home gardens to photograph insects in the beautiful weather. Those bugs will be in another post, but just to show you how good an iPhone bug photographer Jody is, here is a long-jawed spider that she found. It is unedited. I love the piped icing framing its abdomen. I'm an amateur, but it looks as if this species has its abdomen mimic a head so that predators don't bite its head off! That is common is butterflies and moths.

Long-jawed Spider
Genus Tetragnatha

As for me, I got my own Lifer bee, among many other bugs: 

Orange-tipped Wood-Digger (Anthophora terminalis)

We ate our doughnuts with water in the garden as we watched the wasps and bees.

Orleans Federated Church
Orleans Village, Barton, Vermont

Sunday was busy, too. First, to church back in Orleans. Then Amelia and Dori came to help me with housework, and I began cooking: macaroni and cheese, chili, bread, and brownies. We all ended the weekend trading our newest family photos of the grandpuppies.

Amelia's Dori in Orleans

Anna's Stewie and Milo (the Devil Dogs)
in New Haven

I have not had such a normal, brilliant weekend in years.

I hope your weekend was as happy!

Happy Tuesday at
Comedy Plus

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John Missed Finding a Bee

Orange-tipped Wood-digger bee
(Anthophora terminalis)

On June 22, 2020, I found an Orange-tipped Wood-digger bee (Anthophora terminalis). You have to understand a few things to understand how much excitement this caused. John, my husband, and I found bugs both common and uncommon in Orleans County. He had great eyes and I worked the camera. We hiked our land as much as possible to find more. But he died. And now, because of arthritic knees, I haven't been able to walk about searching for bugs like we used to do. With a cane or walker and a chair, I can set myself down near promising areas and shoot. It's actually a good way to get a phenology and inventory of creatures that are in a very small area. You can find dozens if you sit long enough. But without my beloved John, it is as sad as it is comforting to go on a bug hunt.

 

The bee in the these photos settled in front of me for a brief moment and I managed to get eight shots off before it left, only two of which were usable. I knew it was not a bumble bee but had no idea what it was. I always submit my insect shots to iNaturalist, where members (community scientists and professional scientists of all kinds) identify plants and animals. When a renowned Vermont bee expert identified my bee that day, I whopped. Loudly.

 

No one before June, 2020, had found this species so far north in Vermont. I submitted the find to bugguide.net for confirmation, and it came in overnight from a world-renowned international bee expert.

 

These photos now document the first reporting of this bee in Orleans County. iNaturalist had eight other sightings in other Vermont counties that season. I am in the company of the great community scientists that I so admire. 

 

I was sad that John missed out on the excitement. He was such an enthusiastic part of these quests, and he would have been proud of this find. But despite his death, my knees, the pandemic, and the tragedy of fellow Americans suffering under racism and hate, I have learned that sometimes something wonderful like this can still happen. Sometimes, I can smile again.

Read more Nature Notes here.

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