The Urban Pantheist

If you find your mousetraps in the morning stripped of the bait with no mouse caught, try hot gluing solid bait. Normally I use peanut butter, but invertebrates such as insects and slugs can clean off the bait pedal without setting the trap off. I read a paper suggesting that you hot glue an almond to the bait pedal--this has had some success, but ants and some other creatures can eat the almond. In this case there were mice eating duck pellets, so I hot glued a parrot pellet (basically the same ingredients, just bigger) to the traps. So far we've caught 3 mice this way.

I used my workout app to track my pest control duty at Stone Zoo the other day. I was treating the catch basins--the parts of the storm drains that hold water--with mosquito larvacide. I believe I posted about this a few years and someone, probably calypso72 because she's very smart, suggested I use GPS technology to keep track of all of them. At the time, the technology or perhaps my faith in it, was lacking. Now I think it is possible to make a storm drain map of both zoos using this technology.

There. That's 52 catch basins treated for mosquito larvae.

I got a radio call early Monday morning that there was a "yellow jacket issue at the Organic Garden Shed." I grabbed my can of Wasp Freeze and hopped on the bike to go check it out. When I got there, there were no yellow jackets anywhere, but there were several large bees flying around. I caught one with an insect net and tossed it in the fridge, to slow it down so that I could identify it.

I'm reasonably certain that this is a male Megachile sculpturalis, or giant resin bee. This species is a relatively recent introduction from Asia. The males engage in aggressive posturing at potential nest sites--mainly empty carpenter bee nests. What my coworker mistook for a dangerous situation involving scary wasps turned out to be a big show being put on by male bees who are completely stingless.


As it turned out, later in the day I found the same kind of bee near the concessions area, staking out a hole in a fencepost. I knew this was completely harmless, but that it would result in a lot of frayed nerves from people trying to pass by to get chicken fingers. I jammed a couple sticks in the hole to make it a less attractive nest site.

It's high time that I immortalized the look I have on my face when I'm staring at my phone--everyone else gets to see it all the time.

( and then another one )

Much of the day's work was generating this huge stack of MSDS sheets. ("Material Safety Data Sheet" sheets)

European paper wasp nest, Franklin Park. These wasps can usually be tolerated, since they feed exclusively on other insects (and not on trash, like yellow jackets do). Unfortunately they often build their nests on man-made structures—I removed this one from a storage shed.