October
A collection of photos and videos from October 2022. (Please do click on the gallery photos to see them in full size!)
The Caper White butterflies have arrived, bees are swarming, a weekend for Malleefowl, a Giant Scavenging Water Beetle and Swallowtail butterflies.
The Caper White butterflies have arrived at Raakajlim in the northern Mallee. There's a pale form and a dark form of the butterfly. This had me confused for a long time!
The butterflies blow in on the northerly winds and flap about but they don't generally breed here. Their food plants are further north in NSW and Queensland, in the caper family (Wild Orange, Currant Bush, Native Caper). But I've just planted some Caper plants in my garden so it will be interesting to see if caterpillars completely defoliate the plants!
I'm looking forward to seeing a mass migration. In 2016, there was a huge migration with clouds of butterflies flying at 2-3m above ground. Sadly though, the migrations aren't always well thought out and have ended up in the sea, or at a location with no host plants to feed the caterpillars.
How did you go with Capeweed this year? We got absolutely smashed. The weed crept along our tracks and popped up throughout the bush in new little incursions. I've been chasing them for months. There were plenty of honeybees on the Capeweed too and I even saw a swarm of bees moving this year. It's horribly fascinating to see a writhing mass of bees, and so noisy!
A friend told me she'd heard the abundance of Capeweed contributed to more swarms this year. The huge amounts of pollen and nectar mean the bee colonies proliferate, outgrow their home and swarm off to another location. Of course, I Googled this behaviour ...
Apparently, before she leaves, the queen lays some eggs that will become new queens. Then she takes off with half the colony to find a new spot to live. Back in the old colony, the strongest queen to hatch kills the others. She then mates with a drone before settling down with her female worker bees to establish her colony. It's a pretty diabolical story of matriarchal world domination ...
I saw this photo come past from the Victorian Malleefowl Recovery Group and I had to share it. It's the volunteers who attended this year's training weekend. What an incredible group!
The weekend refreshes old hands and introduces new hands to the science and art of monitoring Malleefowl mounds. It's the longest running citizen science project in Australia (we reckon).
This year, Phil and I were guest presenters, talking about our plans to entice Malleefowl onto Raakajlim. It was a great weekend: great people and great food provided by the Karen community of Nhill and the Rainbow (I think) Scouts.
You know things are wet when a giant water beetle turns up in the Mallee sand dunes.
This guy was about 4 cm long and I loved his hairy legs.
A huge shout out to the authors of a pictorial guide to large water bugs. Because they're right: "without a name [bugs] are for all intents and purposes invisible. They can’t usefully be talked about ... or just admired for their own intrinsic selves."
This is a Giant Water Scavenging Beetle (Hydrophilus latipalpus).
And from the authors, I also learnt the highly technical "bugs suck and beetles chew" trick of picking bugs from beetles based on the mouthparts.
Chequered Swallowtail doing its thing ...
The food plant for the caterpillars (Cullen) is growing in abundance this year, so I guess the butterflies are too.
This is a round-up of our social media posts from October 2022. This collection is for those who don’t spend much time on Facebook or Instagram, and apologies to those who have already seen these.