Day 5: PROFESSOR'S CHOICE

Thursday, July-14-2022

After breakfast this day we returned to the research sites, took down our traps, and with the help of the interns, emptied them into kill jars. Dr. Grant was with us this day, so we drove up to her newly purchased DSR property. There, she helped us up a hill to deserted mason bee nest holes in a rock.

Vacated mason bee nest site near Dr. Grant's property on the ranch

There were no signs of the mason bees that had made the holes.

From the Internet:

 “Mason bee is a name now commonly used for a species of bees in the genus Osmia, of the family Megachilidae.

“Mason bees are named for their habit of using mud or other ‘masonry’ products in constructing their nests, which are made in naturally occurring gaps such as between cracks in stones or other small dark cavities. When available, some species preferentially use hollow stems or holes in wood made by wood-boring insects but they may also bore holes in brick and mortar.

“Mason bees are extraordinary pollinators–just 250-300 females can pollinate an entire acre of apples or cherries – and mason bees are often touted as being more efficient than honey bees. Also, of the roughly 150 mason bee types in North America, most are native.

“Despite being solitary bees, mason bees will return to the same nests for years so chances are if you're seeing mason bees now you will be for the foreseeable future, too. New maturing bees will often seek out new holes in the same masonry creating a community that spans several generations of bees.”

After viewing the nest and some of the flora in the area, we walked up the road, which was at the very edge of the Dixie National Forest, and then divided into groups to sit and do another FVR. Leeloo and I were paired and two other groups chose a clump of the same flower (cannot now remember the species) at roadside. 

Bridges Penstemon                         Big Bract Verbena                           Coyote Tobacco

There were longhorn steer along the road so we were careful not to spook them.

Deer Springs Ranch Owners Association photo; could this be Ferdinand?

Eileen and Jackie explored farther up the dirt track while we sat on our three-legged stools and recorded pollinators visiting our flowers. Leeloo and I had recorded only two visitors, neither of them bees, when Eileen and Jackie returned and breathlessly showed us the horned lizard (horny toad) they had found in the dirt track.

A female velvet ant, and a handful of 
short-horned lizard newborns (Internet)

For the moment, all floral visitation rate (FVR) observations ceased.  We  all gathered ‘round to see this fat lizard the size of one’s palm. My reading tells me that this horned lizard was probably a Greater
Short-horned Lizard (Phrynosoma hernandesi). My reading also told me that these lizards can give birth to as many as forty babies at a time! Maybe the plump one found by Eileen and Jackie was pregnant. Walking back to the van, we found another horned lizard, this one much smaller, dusty brown and more like the "horny toads" I know. We also spotted two female velvet ants (really wasps). The males have dark wings.

We finished our FVRs and then returned to Cabin #1. Here Jackie found that the van had a flat rear tire. She called Kurt and he came from the ranch. After a bit of elbow grease, the spare was wrestled out from under the van and put on to replace the flat tire. Then Kurt made us dinner tacos. Eileen, who had saved a large kettle of leftover chicken from last night’s meal, volunteered to pull the chicken so we had chicken as well as vegetarian tacos. They were delicious!

Prionus heroicus

After dinner that evening we voted on “Option #1—Lick Wash Hike” for our final recreation day. I rested a bit at the cabin. When it got dark (about 8:45 pm) I hiked back up to Cabin #1 to observe the light trapping. We were hoping that a large 2+-inch Longhorned beetle (Prionus heroicus) (left) would be attracted to the lighted white screen. Sadly, it began to rain and the light trapping was a bust. Matt’s two children—his family had arrived on our second day—had a great time, however, plucking small insects from both sides of the lighted screen. I think Isaac captured two small junebug-type beetles for the collection, also.