Spodoptera before and after feasting on Sedum album

the general army worm has emerged!

This is what happened to the worm I found in my experiment and kept in a plastic container for a few weeks. I added the flowers in case he is hungry, but I am not sure these are the right kind. Follow this link to see the worm prior to metamorphosis.

more flowers and insects

Sedum album in flower below and I think a "buckeye" butterfly (?) on this kamschaticum

flowers

so I have decided to let the plants flower since they seem to have added on a lot of biomass over the summer. the bees are pleased with this. there are bee boxes behind the greenhouse and i got to see a bee-keeping class open them up last week. this week we got a sample. fresh honey definitely beats the store-bought stuff.

proof that this is not easy

Here are some funny pics of my adventures trying to get aerial photos.  The first picture is a view of the camera stand  (see previous post) taken by the camera after it fell off of the stand.  Then there are the numerous photos taken of my arm when the timer went off before I could raise the camera up on the stand.  I have obviously still not perfected the art of aerial photography,  (my field of view is slightly too small), but I thought it would be useful to document the struggle. I went ahead and did some digital analysis of the photos I have so far.  On the sexangulare platform, there is approx 35% coverage, 40% coverage on the kamschaticum platform, and 50% on the album (shown here); these estimates are all probably slightly over due to my inability to photo the platform edge. Special thanks to Colleen Butler at Tufts who helped me figure out how to use imageJ to do this analysis.