NO ABSOLUTELY NO 5 AM NO 8 AM NO NO NO NO PARTICULARLY NO 7 DAYS A WEEK

please don't come for me, I promise I'll be great, just let me keep what's mine please don't come for me, if you must then just please wait & let me have some time please don't come for me mind over matter

anyhow. raised beds in zone 10a/b. bad soil, city neighborhood with lots of rats, squirrels and birds. I'm thinking buy the box, or use a simple kit. the use pvc arches to support exclusion netting. maybe just start out with one of those enormous galvanized steel tubs?

Waking from uneasy dreams to find I've been transformed into a giant insect

helping a friend build raised beds for their garden. I grow in ground, but they have soil quality issues and wildlife pressure. been looking at kits and builds for a bit and thought "hey, I could check bsky!" find some clever builds, be able to ask Qs.. .. don't search "raised beds" on bluesky.

a lil cricket from today. inaturalist is down for maintenence and apple ID is as reliable as ever! #bugsky #cricket #orthoptera

how did I find out about Megachile lucifer from a friend that's not interested in insects?!

my apologies to the nest(?) of harvestmen I disturbed yesterday. I did not mean to intrude on your cozy space. I respect that hundreds of you can chill together, but you didn't need to all chase after me! (I know they're harmless but they're so fast on those spindly legs!)

your life is your own. but buy a brother printer. we want you to be happy, carol (is there a list of brands that haven't fallen to enshittification? don't say wirecutter)

I just think they are neat #fanart

Lots of folks captioning aurora photos like "for a few minutes we didn't think about politics" guess I'm built different, every time I'm out trying to see night sky stuff I frequently think about how much light pollution is entirely preventable with just a tiny bit of regulation

I need Joyce Carol Oates to be mean to me online so I can get my life together

one of the funniest parts about Joyce Carol Oates going viral for nuking Elon Musk is that he absolutely needed someone tell him who Joyce Carol Oates is

could I please fall into an all consuming passion? I'm tired of thinking about stuff.

backpack, head tassel and a handle? man wasps got great accessories

best state map

Well good news bad news I made exactly $5 for 4 hours of work. Good news, there was a minibike takeover and I have something to pitch.

A well-loved bunchberry plant (Cornus canadensis) with leaf mines of Phytomyza agromyzina (lower left), Antispila cornifoliella (other linear mines), Antispila freemani (big blotches), and a Caloptilia sp. (narrow blotch and leaf roll at right), as well as stippling from leafhopper feeding.

apparently my vocabulary is ok for work, but not ok for bluesky?

"you should make a blog!" they said I was good at that sort of writing, 15 years ago. but who reads blogs anymore?

#gall #meme

I'm about to be xx years old and I can't snap my fingers. been practicing for months, it was a fun silly bday goal alas!

thank you to the bugs

I'm down on the water I'm down on the water we don't like what we just saw but I can't swim so I'll dog paddle I can't swim so I'll dog paddle

do not go gentle into that good night , we all should write and rave at close of day; plums & rage against the dying of light.

This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.

2nd panel is me today

today's main character, goody two shoes, was rather dreadful. can we stick with stuff like folks who make flowcharts of their sex lives? heck I'd even settle for bill pencil posting thru it, or another round of burrito taxi

go to bed, or eat chocolate?

#invertober 18, black n yellow mud dauber!! i love love love a wasp #invertober2025

she's got style, she's got grace

it's just bugging out, man

hands you some bugs

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door. 

It wasn’t the feds —  it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help. He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days. chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

has anyone talked about the goofy ass Space Force emblems?

deep cleaning is sometimes like the Mines of Moria. sorry you woke the balrog

this is a sweat bee (Agapostemon sp?), visiting a bush sunflower (Encelia california). these bees are considered 'common' here, but I've never seen one before. I see so many honeybees, sometimes bumblebees. but other native bees? it's rare. #bees #pollinatorprotection

what you plant in your garden matters. advocating for protected lands matters. habitat restoration matters.

Bees matter. Pollinators matter. Our food production relies on honeybees. If you want to have some honey bees in your backyard, that's fine. But other pollinators are in peril. butterflies, wasps, beetles, flies, etc etc.

- almond pollination is an opportunity for bees from all over the US to exchange pests and diseases - quite often there's pesticide exposure (particularly fungicides) -colony collapse is attributable to MANY factors. in the US, I think the practices around almond pollination are a major driver

- beekeepers bring in ~$200-$250 per hive for almond pollination services - beekeepers make more money from pollination than they do from honey - transportation of bees is hard on the bees. it's hard on the workers too.

- California grows 80%+ of the world's almonds - millions of honey bee hives are needed to pollinate these almonds - there's an annual megaconvergence of honeybees in a few California counties - not all beekeepers go to almonds, but it's lucrative

ugh, ok. turns out I should have written this out as a draft, instead of piecemeal. looking at hive photos bummed me out and I couldn't get myself back on track. a few points I wanted to make:

here's a small example. they'd be on the lids and piled on the ground around the hives. had to scrape out and sanitize my boots.

I remember exactly where I was the first time I smelled dead bees. it had never occurred to me that there'd be a smell. hundreds of hives in the bee yard, and thousands of dead bees pushed out of the hives. it's a lot of biomass.

all those hives stacked together, under insect netting? you can't stop during daylight, they'll overheat. even following that rule, many bees don't survive the trip. the beekeepers would make their drops during the night, and I'd come along in the morning to inspect.

beehives on arrival are a sorry sight. beekeepers load and unload overnight - when it's cooler, the bees are less active. safer to handle, and more likely to be in the hive. while the bees are in transit, there's one rule: if the sun is out, you don't stop the truck.

I had a concise, neat story to tell, but then I keep remembering things I'd like to weave in. a bit of a disclaimer: I am not an entomologist. but I used to be an apiary inspector. honey bees have been in N America for hundreds of years, they're not going anywhere.

I was to talk about a native bee I'd never seen before I want to talk about honey bees, and what #pollinatorprotection actually means. but first I need to sleep

the queens will lay eggs, the hives will get bigger. you want robust hives when you meet the bee broker. because pretty soon, it's gonna be time for A'MOND pollination