Buzz Pollination

Here is a video of a Bumble bee gathering pollen from a nightshade. Bumble bees are able to vibrate their wing muscles at just the right frequency to release the pollen from the special stamens on these types of flowers. They also buzz pollinate tomatoes, blueberries, and other related plants. If you listen closely on the video you should be able to hear the distinctive buzz that shakes the pollen out of the flower.

Look out David Attenborough!

We saw some ants tending aphids outside our back door the other day. The pictures that we took didn't really do it justice, so I took this video. Now, its not quite BBC quality, but I'm just happy that I figured out how to upload videos to the blog.

Invasion of the carpenter ants!

We were interrupted while making our homemade potting mix by these giant flying ants!

They were emerging from somewhere in the foreclosed house next door by the hundreds. Of course we caught as many as we could and fed them to the chickens! They are probably carpenter ants.  Ants don't usually have wings of course, but these are the new generation of queens heading out to find a mate and establish a new nest. They will lose their wings soon since they won't be needing them in the nest.

In case you are interested, our homemade potting mix consisted of:
3 parts vermicompost
3 parts vermiculite
5 parts peat moss
1 part tube sand from an old bag in the back yard

Check back later and I'll let you know how our plants did in it!

Cinco de Mayo!

For a Cinco de Mayo party, we made these delicious chocolate-chile cupcakes with avocado-lime frosting.

The cupcakes were just a basic chocolate cake recipe from this cookbook (+cayenne pepper) and the frosting was a modified version of this recipe.