Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Over 40 Years of Growing Gardens and Gardeners
Public education classes offered from through August 2024 are now on the website in the Master Gardener Virtual Classroom. Each video has been edited and captioned, and each page includes multiple resources.
You may have heard Virginia now has an official state pollinator - the European honey bee (Apis mellifera). How, you ask, did the EUROPEAN honey bee get the designation?
Homeowners have an opportunity to restore native habitat for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife.
The Xerces Society emphasizes that we can help bumble bees thrive by providing three key types of habitat: plants offering pollen and nectar on which to forage, nesting sites, and places to overwinter. Extension Master Gardeners encourage the public to create, protect, restore, and enhance high quality bumble bee habitat. By implementing these practices and creating corridors between habitat, we can help slow, stop, and reverse the recent decline of bumble bee populations.
Pollinator Week 2020
Without pollinators and other insects, life as we know it would cease to exist. Learn how pollinators are under threat.
At a mere ¼-inch long, Hylaeus bees do not dominate a flower like fuzzy bumble bees three to six times their size. However, if you have sharp eyes or a zoom camera lens you can appreciate their unique appearance and BEE-havior.
Imagine being a pollinator drawn to a fragrant flower that offers abundant nectar . . . It's Pollinator Week!
Pollinator Week 2020: Happy Pollinator Week!
Join the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia in observing this week, June 22–28, 2020, by learning more about some of the insects, birds, bats and other small mammals that pollinate at least 80 percent of our flowering plants and about 33 percent of our food crops as well as what you can do to sustain pollinators.
Parents often feed their chicks even after they fledge, similar to what some human parents experience these days with their Millennial fledges. And while local parents have recently been confronting scarce supplies of paper products and frozen pizzas, these poor bird parents will tell you they’ve been suffering caterpillar shortages in this urban area for years.
Now that temperatures have warmed, we eagerly work outdoors in our gardens, while indoors, with perhaps less enthusiasm, we tackle our home’s spring-cleaning projects – like window washing. As you slide the screens or storm windows up or down the tracks, you may be surprised to see hay-like pieces fall on the sill. Inside a track, you likely will discover dried grass packed within the cavity along with cocoons.
Spring is a season of hope and renewal and yet we find ourselves battling together, in isolation, an unseen enemy–coronavirus or COVID-19. Staying home, does not necessarily mean staying indoors and physically distancing ourselves from one another does not mean distancing ourselves from nature.
Spring is a season of hope and renewal and yet we find ourselves battling together, in isolation, an unseen enemy–coronavirus or COVID-19. Staying home, does not necessarily mean staying indoors and physically distancing ourselves from one another does not mean distancing ourselves from nature.
🐝🐝🐝Are you interested in bee keeping? There are a variety of reasons that folks find themselves interested in bees: some want to save them, some want to increase their fruit and vegetable pollination, others want to produce honey.
Recent studies are documenting dramatic declines in the number and diversity of insects around the world. Entomologists, ecologists, and other scientists are expressing shock at the speed and scope of these losses, and they are pointing to these steep declines as a sign of broader ecosystem collapse.
In 2008, I attended a lecture by Dr. Douglas Tallamy about how suburban gardeners can make a significant positive impact on our environment by using native plants. His talk was full of fascinating facts and examples. It spoke to my long-held concern for the problems facing the natural world , and gave me hope that I could actually make a difference just by how I gardened – something I loved doing.
If you are outside working in your garden, or just enjoying the many flowers that bloom throughout the growing season, then you may happen upon ladybugs or lady beetles. The most common ones in this area, though, are not native to North America.
As bees feed on flower nectar, their electrostatically-charged and branched body hairs attract and trap pollen grains. They carry the grains from flower to flower making them very effective pollinators. (About one-third of agricultural crops world-wide depend directly or indirectly on bees for pollination.) Both male and female bees feed on flower nectar, which provides carbohydrates and energy. However, only the female bees gather and carry pollen back to the nest or hive. Pollen provides protein that is essential for developing larvae.
If you think that this red-orange and black insect is a large milkweed bug (Oncopeltus fasciatus), then you would be correct.
