Month: November 2025

Why give thanks to the bees? Here’s why. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service some 4,000 species of native wild bees pollinate a vast assortment of agricultural crops in the United States, including several of those we will find on our Thanksgiving table. Bees are key providers of pollination services to agricultural crops. Estimates of this value in North America and the US range from 15 to 34 billion dollars annually. Worldwide, the United Nation estimates the worth of pollinators to global food production ranges between 235 to 577 billion dollars annually. Although they are not native to the US, our hard-working honey bees contribute 5.4 billion dollars annually to our agriculture and in 2023 honey bees produced some 139 million pounds of honey valued at $2.52 per pound. While these figures are mind-boggling, one easy way to wrap your head around the benefit of pollinators is this: every third bite of food you take is brought to you by a pollinator.

For many of us this week, Thanksgiving provides a memorable feast with family and friends. While the iconic turkey and fixings are fine, my personal favorite of the Thanksgiving feast is dessert, where tasty pies take center stage. Who doesn’t like pie to top off a turkey coma? So, let’s take a quick “tour de pie” to learn why we need to celebrate and give thanks to bees on this Thanksgiving Day.  

Cherry pie – Blue orchard mason bees

The first days of spring herald blue orchard mason bees. These early risers emerge in March and April to pollinate cherry trees, the fruit for our cherry pies.

Apple pie – Rufus-backed cellophane bees

Here in the DMV in April and May cellophane bees emerge, tussle a bit, and then fly off to pollinate a variety of plants including apple trees. Apple sauce, apple dumplings, apple pie.

Pumpkin pies – Eastern cucurbit bee

What would Thanksgiving be without pumpkin pie, brought to us by amazingly cute cucurbit bees, a.k.a. squash bees?  

Blueberry pie – Perplexing bumble bee

Beautiful perplexing bumble bees buzz-pollinate a wide variety of native plants and crops, including blueberries. As an added Thanksgiving treat, bumble bees pollinate the cranberries that garnish your turkey. 

Honey bees – Apis mellifera

Hardworking honey bees pollinate plants that provide fruit for pie filling in addition to pollinating other vegetables and beautiful bouquets gracing our Thanksgiving table. 

Unfortunately, all is not well in the realm of bees. A recent report on pollinators found that 34.7% of bees in North America are at an elevated risk of extinction with solitary species at the greatest risk. The root causes of these threats varied among different regions of the continent. In western and northern regions, climate change created the greatest risks to bees. In addition to climate change, agriculture presented an additional threat to bees in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. In the eastern United States including the DMV, pollution, housing and urban development, as well as agriculture were the biggest threats to bees. What about our iconic honey bees? Well, between June 2024 and March 2025 commercial beekeepers experienced catastrophic colony declines with  62% of their colonies lost, the largest losses ever recorded . Even hobbyist beekeepers felt the sting with a loss of 51% of their colonies.

Let’s be thankful for bees at our Thanksgiving dinner. Little ones like the early-rising blue orchard mason bee as she puts the finishing touches on a brood chamber that might be full of apple pollen ensuring apples for apple pies this Thanksgiving. Next, a female rufus-backed cellophane bee tussles with some male suitors before flying off just in time to pollinate a cherry tree. Any time of year cherry pie is a favorite. In addition to squash, my squash bees pollinate pumpkins for Jack O’ Lanterns and, yes, pumpkin pies. Perplexing bumble bees pollinate a wide variety of crops and flowering plants. When not pollinating teasel, they may be working on blueberries for blueberry pie or cranberries for the cranberry sauce at the Thanksgiving feast. Hardworking honey bees pollinate plants that provide fruit for filling pies, vegetables gracing our Thanksgiving table, and hundreds of other agricultural crops and flowering plants. So, let’s give thanks to our amazing bees on this Thanksgiving Day.

There are things all of us can do to show our gratitude to bees. To learn more about ways to help save our bees and the services they provide, please visit the Bee Conservancy’s website “10 Ways to Save the Bees…”. Also, David Goulson’s remarkable book “Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse” helps us understand the plight of bees and all insects and is replete with actions that governments and individuals can take to help preserve insects and the natural world.

On this Thanksgiving Day, as we eat our pumpkin or apple pies, let’s take a moment to give a little thanks to the industrious cadre of tiny, winged creatures that help bring us our meals and help the natural world keep on turning, the bees.

Acknowledgements

Bug of the Week thanks Margarita López-Uribe whose fascinating studies of squash bees inspired this episode. The important reference “Elevated extinction risk in over one-fifth of native North American pollinators” by Tara Cornelisse, David W. Inouye, Rebecca E. Irwin, and Bruce E. Young, and “Silent World” by David Goulson were consulted to prepare this episode.

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Previous episodes of Bug of the Week featured invaders from Asia including Emerald Ash Borer, Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Joró spider and Kudzu Bug. During this season of home invasions by the likes of spiders, lady beetles, and stink bugs, I have received lots of inquiries about creepy camel crickets showing up in basements and bathrooms.  A decade ago, a fascinating study revealed that two species of Asian camel crickets, Tachycines asynamorus and Diestrammena japanica had bested our native camel crickets as rulers of residential man-caves and basement bedrooms. Researchers in North Carolina State University conducted a national survey and discovered that in places like Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, more than 90% of the camel crickets found in homes were Asian camel crickets.

Camel crickets in the genus Tachycines asynamorus, sometimes known as Diestrammena asynamorus, were first detected in the United States in a greenhouse in Minnesota in 1898 and dubbed the greenhouse camel cricket. Who would have guessed that in little more than a century they would become a dominant home invader? These dromedaries of the insect world are so named for their humpbacked appearance. Like their cousins, field crickets, camel crickets (a.k.a. cave crickets) have extraordinarily long hind legs and prodigious antennae. The antennae bear sense organs that enable camel crickets to detect food and avoid predators in dark, damp habitats such as the deep woodlands and caves in which they live. In a realm of perpetual darkness where eyesight is of little value, some cavernicolous species of camel crickets are blind.

Camel crickets consume decaying organic matter such as leaves, roots, and fruits. They also devour rotting remains of other insects, including their kin. In the human-built environment, when not invading dwellings, camel crickets are found in tool sheds, damp wood piles, beneath upturned wheelbarrows, or in cool dank spots such as a leafy redoubt behind a rubbish bin along the shaded, northern aspect of my foundation. In addition to engendering the “yuck” response, they are occasional pests because they nibble stored fabrics. In tool sheds their fecal remains stain wood and tools.

The study by scientists in North Carolina focused on camel crickets in and around homes. While exploring a cave in Western Maryland, I wondered if these Asian camel crickets had also invaded the natural, aboriginal habitats of our native North American camel cricket.  A rather quick spelunking adventure inside the cave revealed dozens of greenhouse camel crickets hiding in crevices and galleries within the cave. We are currently researching the extent of these incursions in caves here in the DMV.

This time of year, I get lots of phone calls and emails about creepy camel crickets in people’s basements, bathrooms, and maybe even in the bathtub. Guess what? They didn’t evolve in your basement. They evolved in places just like this limestone cavern here in Western Maryland. Let’s go inside and see if we can find some camel crickets. About 100 feet in, I’m starting to see cave crickets. Inside this rocky crevice there’s a whole gaggle of crickets. Here is a big one and, like the ones in your home, she is a really good jumper. I wonder if these are non-native camel crickets or native ones. I guess to a camel cricket the dark interior of the tool shed looks a lot like a cave, because this tool shed has a lot of camel crickets inside. It’s fascinating that the camel crickets in my tool shed are the same species of non-native camel crickets that we found inside that natural cave in western Maryland.

What can you do about camel crickets in your home? Well, their annual home invasion begins in force late in summer and early autumn and they favor basements, garages, and crawl spaces with high humidity and low light levels. Camel crickets enter homes through portals including cracks in the foundation, voids around basement windows, spaces beneath doors, and holes where plumbing and electrical utilities exit and enter. Little crickets enter early in the season of siege and often go unnoticed, but as they scavenge food and grow, they become more apparent.

Here are some helpful tricks to keep these curious crickets out of your home. Remove wood piles and vegetation near the foundation of your home. These refuges are ideal sites for camel crickets to multiply and later enter your home. Caulk and seal all openings outdoors around the foundation. Replace and repair door sweeps and reduce levels of humidity in the basement. If you find crickets inside, you can capture them and place them outdoors. Or as one cricket aficionado noted, they make excellent fish bait. Fortunately, when wrangling these leapers, I have a long-handled insect net that gets the job done. If you are armed with a vacuum cleaner or jar, I wish you luck. Sticky traps such as those used for snaring roaches can be placed on the basement floor. I have found the corner junction of two walls to be a productive spot for catching crickets, as many species like to travel with a shoulder near a wall, a behavior known as thigmotaxis.

Though wingless, camel crickets have remarkable powers of locomotion. Long, powerful legs provide an uncanny ability to jump. Recently, as I chased one sartorial visitor around the bathtub, it easily cleared the edge of the tub – a leap ten times its own height. While this feat might seem trivial, in human terms this would be equivalent to me slam-dunking at a rim 60 feet above the court! In my dreams. With the reality of Asian camel crickets in the basement and Asian stink bugs in my attic, it only seems fitting to order some Chinese food for dinner tonight.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Abby, Eliose, and Paula for providing the inspiration for this episode. The wonderful article “Too big to be noticed: cryptic invasion of Asian camel crickets in North American houses” by Mary Jane Epps, Holly L. Menninger, Nathan LaSala, and Robert R. Dunn was used as a reference for this story.

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Last week on a sunny afternoon, a busy ensemble of stink bugs, lady beetles, and other insects ambled about the siding of a white farmhouse along the C & O canal in western Maryland. Among the most interesting of the gang was a five-legged, leaffooted bug.  Let’s start with the business of the identity of a leaffooted bug. Leaffooters belong to an insect family called Coreidae, members of order of insects named Hemiptera. These ‘true bugs’ have sucking mouthparts, two pairs of wings, and immature feeding stages called nymphs. More familiar members of this clan include stink bugs, squash bugs, and assassin bugs we’ve met in previous episodes. Leaffooted bugs are so named for the remarkable leaf-like ornamentation on their hind legs. Leaffooted bugs are herbivores, consuming plant tissues as juveniles and adults.

Ok, what’s so cool about a leaffooted bug, especially one with five-legs? First, what in the world are those fantastic leaf-like structures on the hind legs for anyway? Some male relatives of the leaffooted bugs we visit today have mighty, enlarged hind legs. These powerful legs, termed “sexual weapons”, are used to battle other males for mating territories and access to females. A second, and perhaps more fascinating purpose, is to direct a potentially lethal attack by a bird away from a vital body part like the head, to a less critical body part like a showy or colorful flag on the hind tibia of the bug. A fascinating study by Zachary Emberts and colleagues found that several members of the leaffooted clan had evolved the ability to drop a limb (= autotomy), to avoid death or entrapment by predators. This induced “loss of a leg” results when the femur of the upper leg detaches from a small segment called the trochanter near insect’s body.

Watch as a five-legged leaffooted bug ambles along a railing on a bridge. Several members of the leaffooted clan have evolved autotomy, the ability to drop a limb under dire circumstances like a predator attack. The showy flag on the hind leg likely directs a potentially lethal attack away from a vital body part like the head, to a less critical part like a leg. As the leaffooted bug takes flight, it looks like it is better to lose your leg than lose your life. And what are those two white spots on the back of the bug? Tune in to another episode to find out.

How common is leg autotomy? In their study of wild coreids, Embert’s et al. found autotomy to occur from 7.9% to 21.5% of the time in the species examined. While dropping a leg to save a life might sound like a good idea, there is a hitch. Recall that male leaffooted bugs may use legs to battle other males for access to a mate. Males missing a leg may lose out in the mating game. Lose a leg and lose a mate vs lose a leg and save your life. I know what I’d do. How about you?    

Acknowledgements

Bug of the Week thanks Dr. Shrewsbury for helping with wrangling and spotting leaffooted bugs. The fascinating article “Coreidae (Insecta: Hemiptera) Limb Loss and Autotomy” by Zachary Emberts, Colette M. St. Mary, and Christine W. Miller provided valuable insights into the lives of leaffooted bugs and the evolution of autotomy. 

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With Halloween a quickly fading memory, I visited my Jack O’ Lanterns one last time before their final journey to the compost heap. While lamenting the passing of my pumpkins, I was delighted to see dozens of tiny winged workers fully engaged in the decomposition process. Flies are important recyclers of dead plants and animals. They provide a vital ecological service by unlocking nutrients tied up in complex molecules and returning them to food webs. In this episode we meet the fruit fly, a master transformer of plant material. The common name fruit fly is often used to describe small (~ 3 mm) flies with bright red eyes in the family Drosophilidae (a.k.a. vinegar or pumice flies). Larger flies sporting spotted or banded wings in the family Tephritidae also go by the name fruit fly by virtue of their appetite for fruit and other parts of plants. Details of the former will be investigated today and strange dealings of the latter await another episode.

In autumn I regularly receive questions about hordes of tiny fruit flies buzzing around fruit bowls, kitchen sinks, and counter tops. They seem to appear from nowhere and lend credence to Aristotle’s notion that living organisms like tiny flies can originate spontaneously from non-living or putrefying things. Now famous experiments by Francesco Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani pretty much disproved Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation, but the appearance of hordes of tiny flies remains vexing even for bug geeks.

My Jack O’ Lanterns were looking a little squidgy the week after Halloween, festooned with dozens of fruit flies. While adult fruit flies were busy on the surface, taking special care to groom antennae and mouthparts, their offspring were busy dining inside. Watch how this larva uses darkly colored mouth hooks to propel itself forward by grasping the substrate and pulling itself along. Ah, but once it finds just the right juicy spot it stops and slurps the nutritious tissues of decomposing pumpkin flesh. Fruit flies are part of Mother Nature’s team recycling fruits and organic matter.  

To help untangle this mystery, consider the change of seasons.  Autumn in many parts of the country is characterized by damp cool weather by virtue of incessant weekly showers. These moist conditions are nearly ideal for decomposing tons of leaves, fruits, and other vegetable matter, the accumulated bounty of Mother Nature’s efforts during spring, summer, and autumn. This week of early November my compost pile is a writhing mass of invertebrates intent on converting vegetable protein into animal biomass as quickly as possible. On warm days a cloud of fruit flies hovers over my compost pile and some of these winged raiders undoubtedly infiltrate my home when the door opens. Like many kitchens, mine is home to a bowl of fruit that occasionally contains one item that has gone a little squidgy. Yeasty odors of acetic acid and ethanol emanating from an over-ripe banana serve as powerful attractants for fruit flies. After arriving at the banana, the female fruit fly deposits eggs. Each gal lays roughly 500 eggs during the course of her lifetime. Small translucent larvae hatch from the eggs. They glide through the overripe fruit slurping-up nutritious fermenting fluids as they develop and grow. When ambient temperatures are warm, fruit flies can complete a generation in less than two weeks. With their capacity for reproduction, populations around the fruit bowl can explode seemingly overnight.

Fruit flies can also enter your home as stowaways when you purchase overripe fruits or vegetables from the market. These goods may arrive preloaded with a complement of eggs or tiny larvae. To reduce chances of bringing home an infestation, inspect your produce carefully and wash fruits and vegetables. If fruit is unrefrigerated and displayed in a bowl, check it out regularly and toss over-the-hill items before they generate flies. Fruit flies can also breed in sink or floor drains, garbage pails, or recycling containers in homes, restaurants, and offices where decomposing organic material accumulates. Inspect these areas regularly, clean up spills, and disinfect surfaces. For the cloud of fruit flies wafting around your home, consider building a vinegar trap to catch and kill these noisome rascals.  Traps can be purchased commercially, and several trap designs are available on the internet. My DIY vinegar trap consists of an 8 oz clear plastic tumbler filled with 4 oz of wine vinegar and a few drops of dish detergent. Within 24 hours of placing the trap on the counter, more than 100 fruit flies were lured to their death. Stealing a line from Robert Armstrong of King Kong fame (RKO, 1933) “Oh no, it wasn’t the banana that killed the beast. It was the fragrant odor of yeast.”

Acknowledgements

We thank Liz, Ingalisa, and Sahar for providing the inspiration for this episode. The interesting references “Trapping spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae), with combinations of vinegar and wine, and acetic acid and ethanol” by P. J. Landolt, T. Adams, and H. Rogg, and “Flies, gnats, and midges” by W. A. Kolbe in “The Handbook of Pest Control” were used in preparing this Bug of the Week.

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