Summer’s buzz
Morning light creeps in and chases away the night, and with it the crickets that kept you awake with their chirping. The males have four different songs: a loud one for calling females and repelling males; a quieter, courting one; an aggressive one used strictly to warn away males; and a fourth announcing the successful completion of mating. The daylight also announces beddy-bye time for moths, who have been pollinating flowers throughout the night as they feed on nectar. A certain nocturnal scarab beetle, known as a Russian leather beetle, is also calling it quits after a night spent eating dead wood inside hollowed trees.
Meanwhile, as daylight continues to spill in from the eastern horizon, other insects are busying themselves with the orders of the new day, including bees and butterflies eager to get at nectar themselves. The word nectar means food of the gods in Latin, and it is how flowers attract pollinators. It is also the source of the sugar in honey.
Other pollinators, such as Japanese beetles, too, arrive.
There are numerous green bottle flies about, certainly more than there were before the city’s compost program began. They’re useful in determining the time of death of an animal — humans included — for they lay their eggs in dead tissue. Additionally, their larvae, which feed on necrotic matter while leaving living tissue intact, are used in maggot therapy.
Underfoot, meanwhile, as you sip your morning coffee in the backyard, are ants. A colony of 40,000 ants has about as many brain cells as a human. Their nectar is the honeydew of aphids, and ants will go to great lengths to protect them, even taking aphids with them when migrating.
The aphids are wreaking havoc in your garden, though, and the Emerald ash borer has killed your ash tree, but as you return to your kitchen for more coffee, your attention is distracted by the fruit flies around the sink. Put a piece of banana or some balsamic vinegar in a bowl, cover it with cellophane wrap and poke some small holes in the plastic. The flies will fly in but not out. They’ll drown in the vinegar; if you’ve opted for the banana, put the bowl in the freezer for an hour or so every now and then.
Returning to your yard, you swat at a mosquito, flick an earwig from the patio table and wave away a swarm of midges. Meanwhile, as the day wears on and the temperature climbs, you hear cicadas buzzing. According to Hume Douglas, a member of the Entomological Society of Ontario, these are not the famous cicadas that emerge every 13 or 17 years, but rather annual ones known as dog-day cicadas.
There are lots of dragonflies here, too, he says: “There are the wonderful rivers here in Ottawa, pretty unpolluted, as well as cool wetlands. This area is a bit of a destination for dragonfly watchers.” Dragonfly watchers. Who knew? As evening nears, you may even hear a true katydid, named for the sound it makes — “Katy did, Katy didn’t” — so loud it can be heard for blocks. The insect, according to Douglas, has been sighted in Ottawa occasionally for about a decade but probably doesn’t breed here — it’s too cold, he says — and is perhaps a regular but errant passenger on plants and shrubs shipped to nurseries here.
And then the sun begins to set in the west, and you notice the moths and hear the crickets.