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I have these wasps on my maples trees and now all my maples are showing signs of dying what could I use to eliminate these wasps?

Thanks you for this delightful account. It reminds me of my experience with Monarch caterpillars in Massachusetts in the the 1950s:  late one summer I brought one Monarch caterpillar from Keene Valley, NY home to Essex MA in a quart jar with daily freshened milkweed to bring to the school where I taught natural science to grades 1 - 5. I kept water in the bottom of the jar, protected from the wandering caterpillar by a layer of smooth 1” pebbles so s’he couldn’t drown.  Of course i had to change the water almost daily.  the caterpillar grew rapidly and soon hung from its hind “feet” from this was miraculous to watch it climb out of its caterpillar skin as it hung upside down from the twig, and the miraculous moment when it crawled out of its striped skin and incredibly quickly released its new body uno its new chrysalis and hung from the twig. The curled up caterpillar inside is now visible for a very short time as a dark body, and its shrugged off wrinkled old skin is hanging from the twig. The caterpillar-becoming-chrysalis now has to get rid of its old skin without letting go of the twig. The move takes a millisecond so quick that the human eye can’t comprehend it, and there is the chrysalis miraculously still hanging from the milkweed twig. Now it’s time to move it to a hatching jar which has already been prepared with water and pebbles at the bottom for moisture in the air. Then a piece of fine mesh wire goes across the top of the jar to be fastened with a couple of rubber bands.

This should be kept in a quiet place (no sunlight) for a couple of weeks (I can’t remember whether it’s 2 or 3) and one day the kids will notice that the transparent chrysalis shows the folded dark wings of he new butterfly, with black ribs and dark skin showing through the now transparent skin. Very soon the skin will split and the emergent butterfly slowly climbs out and hangs there with its wet, crumpled wings. This ay take quite a while; the jar can be put outside and the if you are lucky enough to have a kids class to watch this, everyone can go outside, sit on the grass in a circle and watch the new butterfly with its newly smooth wings flutter away into the sky.  The children’s s;spontaneous chorus “Good bye!”  brings tears to my eyes.

A year or two later I learned that a caterpillar or chrysalis should NEVER be moved from where it was found for any distance;  I moved the one I found in the Adirondacks 3 states away to Massachusetts:  a No-No;  You are playing God by moving genes across country much faster that nature would allow.

Terrific practical article. Thank you.

Here in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, we too suffer from deer fly attacks. However, our solution is locally made dragonflies, the natural predator of our deer fly.

They are made from bobby pins for the body, white foam for the wings, blue foam for the head, and the body is wrapped in green string which also ties the finished dragonfly to the safety pin then you attach the fly to your hat. A pair of these work wonders; all you have to do is turn your head a little so the deer fly can see the dragonfly, and they veer off like a jet aircraft avoiding ground to air missiles. No killing required.

You wrote, “beets, spinach, and all members of the broccoli family, like kale and cabbage and collards [use C4].”

That is incorrect. None of those use C4 photosynthesis. Those are all C3 plants.

Reading the above comments, I am 98% sure that what we have living in our garage and in between the wall adjacent to the garage are indeed the northern short-tailed shrew !  I’ve been calling them mice ! Our 3 cats have been catching them for past 2 years and it wasn’t until one cat left a field mouse and this shrew (?) few inches apart on door step that I realized we are not dealing with mice in the garage ! Does anyone know IF shrew would do this like mice do ?

Can you eat black berries from alternate leaved dogwood?

Some of the issues you bring up are problems in all parts of the country.  Workman’s comp makes hiring prohibitive so small operations trying to grow find big challenges.  Harvesting equipment is expensive and the value of the raw product is low in many cases.  Also in some parts of the country the big land owner is the federal government and their planning process is difficult at best.  Anyway, this is a good topic of discussion and I hope you include it in the magazine.

Hey Bill Torrey,  That is the best comment I’ve ever read…. anywhere. Well said, and entertaining to say the least. Lumberjacking has always been a tough, dangerous business, not for the weak of heart. Congratulations on 40 years of hard work in the north woods. Anyone who knows logging knows you must of done a lot of things right.

So what is it that keeps us from forming a multi-state pool? I would think that a larger pool would also help states that already have their own.

Interesting, enlightening, and so sweet.  Thank you

Thank you for this fun and interesting article from a parent’s perspective.

Hello-I saw a unique type of moth the other day and couldn’t figure out what it was! I found your page on Google and saw the same moth! I am excited to put a name to the little guy-he was a snowberry clearing! Ty!

Brendan of Concord, NH. If you have a canoe or small boat, you could visit Mount Williams Pond in Weare, NH.  I would use a minnow trap with discarded chicken fat or skin and drop the minnow trap down to the bottom of the lake….tie a rope to it first. Wait about a half hour before bringing the trap back to the surface. It’s also great trout fishing while you are waiting. I have put crayfish in an aquarium and have grown them to 8 inches. However, when crayfish molt they are vulnerable to cannibalism by other crayfish. As a youth, I used to spend my summers on my grandfather’s farm in southern Quebec where we would catch crayfish by the hundreds in the Nicolet River. They are delicious in seafood salads. enjoy!

Yesterday, I saw a small, short all-yellow caterpillar with reddish antennae.  I am unable to identify the caterpillar or what it will become as a butterfly or moth.  Any ideas?

Very, very well done. A ton of insightful analysis on a very complicated subject area. This deserves to be refined a bit and moved into the mag. It deserves a wider audience.

Thanks for bringing me up to date. In the 1990s I tried to write a book about what happens to a tree after it’s cut, but I could never find a voice for it. I don’t regret the research I did for it though, in particular the interesting people I met who all had one thing in common, a love of and reverence for our pucka brush.

Hey there Dave,
As a guy who spent 40 years working in the woods of Vermont and got the hell out in 2013, I can look back with no regrets. I never cut a tree sitting in a cab and the mechanization of our woods workers in order to try to make a living is a sad state of affairs. It doesn’t make things easier, for the reasons you sighted- massive payments on complicated, expensive-to-fix equipment that has a huge footprint that scares off landowners.

Trying to keep woodlots lined up ahead -  it is enough to make you drop a third nut. And then markets for all the wood you cut dries up, or goes belly up, as you try to get your wood trucked on roads that are posted closed for 2-3 months, thanks to our lack of decent winters nowadays.

Small, independent loggers can sometimes find a niche, and with low overhead, you can weather the ups and downs, which is what I did during my career. You might be too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash, but you can survive. I think the day of the boots-on-the ground, saw-in-their-hand logger, is going the way of the cowboy.

Those young loggers you spoke of in Mettowee Valley are optimistic because they have to be. You can’t take on the challenge if you don’t think you have a chance. I know that’s how I went at it. Even on the days when you feel like you’ve been et by a wolf and shat over a cliff, you still head into the woods the next day to cut another hitch. That’s because the vast majority of the people in the woods are there because they love their way of making a living. I just hope when those hurdles get higher than a woodpecker’s hole that they still have the gumption to jump them.

This is so fascinating for me, especially since it will be my 75th birthday.  Loved the article and how it was perceived by those before us.

Thanks for your interest and kind comments. Duckweed are among my favorite plants. Fun biology and easy to work with.