Larry,

The bees will follow the food source. We have a mowed yard, unmowed pastures, overgrown woodland, ponds, springs and a swamp, and veggie garden/flower beds, and the bees go everywhere following all the food sources, unless you.....

Start looking for a broad-spectrum pesticide and use it. Doing so can kill off all your beneficial insects including the bees.

I don't give bugs a second thought when I see them around. If you leave the insects alone, for the most part the beneficial insects will keep the pest-type insects under control. There are very few exceptions, although two exceptions I have found seem to be leaf-footed bugs and stink bugs. I don't seem to have anything here that will prey upon those two pests.

Usually, when people have persistent general pest problems, it is for one of several reasons: (1) their soil is seriously out of balance and their plants are, therefore, unhealthy; (2) their plants are being overfed high doses of chemical fertilizer, esp. nitrogen, and (3) they panic when they see insects and spray toxic broad-spectrum (chemical OR organic) pesticides that destroy the beneficial insects that normally keep bad bugs under control. There are exceptions to this, of course, but I've been here 11 years, have never sprayed a broad-spectrum pesticide and wouldn't do it no matter what, and we have a very attractive yard, flower beds, fruit trees, veggie garden, etc. It is not necessary to poison your own air, land and water to wipe out a few pests that likely aren't going to do that much damage any way.

This is absolutely, positively no way on this earth that you can create an insect-free environment, no matter what you spray. One reason for this is that insects are resistant to many of the broad-spectrum pesticides currently sold. So, it is smarter to work with nature and encourage the beneficial insects that will keep pest insects under control in the most natural way possible. Other than that, you can use repellent sprays, floating row covers, hand-picking of specific pests, bio-insecticides (like Nolo Bait or Semaspore, which contain Nosema locuste which targets only grasshoppers and their close relatives), plantings of specific plants to attract beneficial insects, the purchase and release of beneficial insects, etc.

I've written a lot about this in the past, so rather than rewrite it all over again, I'm going to find a past thread and link it below. The one I'm going to find and link is VERY long but I hope you'll read it.

As for pest identification sites, google and find bugguide.net or whatsthatbug.com. As for an insect ID book, I have one somewhere around here called "The Texas Bug Book" that I like....we seem to have many of the same pests here that they have there.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Previous Thread on Good Bugs/Bad Bugs and More

Dawn,

Thanks. I tried to reply a while ago and goofed. Rather than to go through all I listed then, and maybe still not getting the post to go through. I will just tell you I have saved the thread to my favorites so I can study it from time to time because there is no way I can remember all I read on this site, You guys are great.

I am going to bed now, I have a little yorkie that is pokeing me in the side telling me its time to scratch his tummie.

Thanks again, Larry

I much prefer a yard full of honey bees, moths, butterflies, lizards, birds, tree frogs, snakes, toads, lightening bugs, june bugs, wasps, and mosquitoes to an almost sterile environment pesticides create. Almost sterile because pesticides only really kill the beneficials. The pests build up immunity.

Honey bees work just about everything. I used to mow my acreage in sections so there was always something blooming for them. I don't this year. There is massive amounts of workable plants thanks to good rain.

It's been a great year for honey bees. Jerry came out and checked the hives. They are already storing for winter.

Speaking of moths. This Blinded Sphinx Moth decided to lay eggs in this cup that was sitting on my work bench yesterday while I was boxing up stuff for shipping. How crazy is that?

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This is my 5th county record. Be fun to raise the cats.

randy

Randy,

I guess the rainfall has been great for all the wildlife because I've never seen so many turtles, rabbits, foxes and (unfortunately) coyotes as we have right now. Of course, we always have a lot of the "little things" like dragonflies, frogs, lizards, etc., but we don't have a large population of "big things" some years. We've got a whole lot of birds, too, including wild turkeys.

I've never seen a Blinded Sphinx Moth before. That cup is a very odd place for a moth to lay eggs, but it does seem like the wild things do surprising things a lot, don't they? (Especially at your house!) Enjoy the cats!

We don't have any phoebes this year which is very, very odd. Are your phoebes back and nesting nearby this year?

Dawn

Dawn,

At least two Phoebes wintered over here. The mature male and at least one or two immatures. They are hard to tell apart. That's the second year in a row at least one bird stayed.

They are on their second batch of young right now. First batch left the nest about 3 weeks ago. Still nesting on top of an outdoor bulb over the garage.

Have wrens nesting in a pot inside the garage. :-)

Caught a red ear laying eggs down by the creek a few weeks ago.

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randy

Randy,

Glad to hear the phoebes are "at home" in their usual place.

The red-eared sliders have been all over the yard, and one has dug out a place under the chicken coop/entrance ramp area and is living there He or she comes out during the day while the gate is open and wanders around the yard and then returns to the chicken pen in late afternoon. I have no idea why this turtle decided to live there of all places.

We have another that has worn a path from the woods, through the dog yard, and to the lily pond. It has grown since last year, though, and keeps getting stuck in the fence's 4" x 6" openings and then the dogs bark at it and I have to go yank it out of the fence.

We don't really need TV here....we just watch the wild things.

Dawn

last year all the lightening bugs were in my neighbor's yard, and i figured they didn't like ours due to the spaying of insecticide. This year no spraying. hopefully, so far no ticks have been spotted. I always want to see if I can buy some beneficial insects. I think they all ran away forever. Also I seeded our front lawn with white clover, but so far no bees. Or I am blind as usual. I wait a while before I mow the front lawn because I want bees. And then we have two does and one fawn that keep trying to get in the yard, and so i am glad that our border collie sleeps most of the day and is outside at night. her choice. she does have a doggie door, and so far no wild things have ventured inside. but i still see so few bugs here unless they are beetles and worms. the mosquito problem has almost been wiped out. we had a pond in the acreage next door and i complained to the city about it, but they said there was no cholrine in it so no leak. then we hired a man to mow down that land, and he used to work for the city and called them to check out a leak, and they found when they tore the house down next door they left the meter running. now the pond is gone, and those mystery bugs that kept bitting me were mosquitoes. i know there are a few next door but not many. haven't had any brown recluse in the house since we sprayed two years ago. was it two years? but i do allow the jumping spiders to be inside since they eat them and other things. sure hope some of the neat bugs come back, walking sticks, lace bugs, kadydids, but not those crickets. the year the man sprayed under the house when he opened the door afterwards those hump back crickets came pouring out gasping for air.
i didn't even feel bad for them, but had it been the bugs i love; i would have been trying to save them somehow. oh, we do have mud daubers and leave them alone as well as the bumble bees.

I guess turtles make the dumb animal list Dawn. :-)

Hi Jessaka,

Lightening bugs are kind of like pecans here on our property. Seams like every two to three years we have massive amounts. I shot a video a few years ago where there were hundreds in the frame no matter what direction I turned.

This year is way off. The most I've seen so far at once is about 10. It will pick up just a little when it gets warmer though.

When Amber was 2-6 years old we would both get on the mower with me steering and her swinging a butterfly net around loading up on them as I drove around the yard. :-)

As far as honey bees go, unless you are out looking at the white clover at the time of day they work that plant, you're not going to see them. They have a set schedule they go by. They don't go to the same type of plant all day long.

Once the yard dried up enough to get the mower on the yard every week ticks are almost non existent here. When we were getting a lot of rain and I couldn't mow, ticks were very bad. I was pulling 3-5 a day off myself even with spray on my shoes and boots. I haven't pulled one off in over a week.

randy

Jessaka,

I hope you'll be seeing lightning bugs soon. We've had two "rounds" of them....one about 3 weeks ago and another one this week.

Because y'all were spraying so much during "the tick years", they all probably did run away.

In at least one of the beneticial insect links I posted for you on the other thread, there is a "honeybee lure" that is said to attract bees. At our house, a wide variety of plants (native ones and the ones I've planted) attract bees and they also come to the hummingbird feeders. In the winter, they come to the chicken's hen scratch where they seem to be eating the corn.

Keep in mind that anything you spray inside the house can also pass outside through the air and can affect your population of beneficials too.

So, was the running meter next door responsible for your soil being so insanely wet?

Dawn

No, the water next door was done hill from us.

i had a landscaper come and check out our yard. i was at a lost as what to do with the front yard so it was an eye sore. he used the orange paint to make tree garden areas, and then came into the back yard and told us what to do about this one wet area. all the water from rains runs down from the hill above us and goes to that one area. so we will be making trenches and adding rocks and piling up that area with a lot of mulch. right now it is our veggie garden and will probably always be since it is the main sunny spot in back. we also made another sunny spot for blackberries by cutting down some trees, and so i planted them and holly and quince.

i am thinking that the population of bees just keeps dwindling. last year there were very few on the clover and fruit tree blossoms. maybe i am not seeing them. a garden club friend had to point them out for me last year. ha.

interesting about spray in the house. i was watching something on tv about pollution in the house and realized that maybe i should not use dow bathroom spray. not sure how toxic it is. i imagine spraying poison ivy can kill insects as well, but that is about done since i have been at it for 3 years.

i was going to get guinea hens for the ticks, but people tell me that they will leave. not sure what to do but am tired of spraying for them, but did find a source of that d...earth you mentioned. it was in the list of garden suppliers you gave.

I have never seen a bug year like this one. I would guess it is because of all the rain, plus this is the 2nd or third year I am trying to get by without spraying. I have sprayed a little, but very little.

My lawn and garden has mole run all over it, crayfish mounds every where except the garden. The earthworms are under, and in everything. I expect soon the crickets and frogs will be as thick as they were last year.

Two days ago I saw a turkey hen in the compost pile, looked like she was digging worms. My son lives across the highay, that is where the turkey hen flew when she saw me come out of the house. He also has at least 1 doe and 2 fawns living in the brush behind his house. They are already eating in his garden and I have found tracks in my flower beds.

I walked over and told him to keep his critters home or I was going to send him a feed bill. He just laughed and said if I was mad now, I would be fit to be tied in a few weeks. I guess he is right, looks as though we both may have wasted a lot of time planting a garden.

Larry

Jessaka,

Guineas do like to roam. Ours seem to roam over about 30 to 40 acres, which includes our property, the roadway (sometimes somebody hits one in the road), and parts of the property belonging to four of our neighbors. Luckily, our neighbors don't mind having them on the property eating ticks, grasshoppers, etc.

We have bees all 12 months of the year, but then we don't spray anything toxic so their population has built up to pretty good levels. I know that's not true for everyone around us.....the people who spray their veggie gardens and pastures for insects have trouble getting good pollination of certain veggies and fruits because of a lack of bees. When they ask me why we have bees "all over the place" and they don't, I just say that we don't spray any pesticides that might harm them and we plant flowers to attract them. We've had this same conversation every year since we moved here, and I guess they aren't going to give up their chemicals and they aren't going to have bees so I don't know why they bring it up every year. LOL

Larry,

It is a very bad bug year, but even though I am seeing tons of insects, I am not seeing damage to my crop yields. In fact, I am getting huge broccoli heads which is undoubtedly due to the heavy rains also.

Our wild turkeys come up to the crow's piles of henscratch early in the day and eat a bit and then retreat to the woodland's edge. The deer travel a deer trail through the woods that was there before we bought the land. We have a 7' tall fence around the garden so they can't get into it any more and that has made a huge difference. The cottontail rabbits do stand outside the fence and nibble whatever plants get close to the fence....right now they are eating scarlet runner beans that are growing on the fence itself. For the most part we do enjoy the wildlife even if they do a little damage now and then.

It would be impossible for me to grow anything here without a fenced vegetable garden. Since we improved our fence and made it taller, the amount of damage is very minor. Our little herd of deer numbers 9. They live near the back property line and have several very well-defined deer trails through the woods. I like having them around as long as they aren't eating my plants.

Dawn

I am going to Farmer's Co-Op today. They were supposed to get the hens in by June. I am going for other reasons, but maybe I will not bring home any hens. Hard to say. My husband said he would make a pen for them until they got big enough, but he is not for my getting any, but I am not for spraying ticks either. He is funny about things. I started to feed a stray cat and ended up really tame. And there are four more strays out there, and all the sudden I see him feeding all the cats. I told him that people tell me to feed the deer corn so they won't eat our garden; he says no again. I had one friend tell me that corn kills deeer. I don't know; others around here say it doesn't. The guy at Farmer's said it would bring more deer. then another friend heard of a motion detection water sprinkler that turns on when any animals are near your plants. i called around and only found it on amazon. they are $60 each, and we would need a lot to save everything. lol. so i just use deer nets on our trees and blackberries and worry that a bird will get caught in them. i can see my husband putting a fence around the veggies and a net over them before he will chase away the deer. and yet there is a nursery in the wilderness just outside of town and she has open accesss to her plants and also at her home is a large veggie garden that she says the deer don't bother. hmmm. maybe it will happen when tomatoes are ripe, etc.

It is fun reading evervyone's posts.

Jessaka,

If you get hens, they need a place to be locked up securely at night or they won't last very long.

Every predator out there will kill your chicks before they can grow up if you don't have them in a cage with very small mesh. We have a brooder cage for chicks that has 1/4" mesh and very secure doorways so snakes cannot get into the brooder and eat the chicks. If we had flat, even land we'd have a chicken tractor (moveable pen) for them.

At our house, our own dogs and cats don't bother the chickens and guineas, but neighborhood dogs, cats, bobcats, ring-tailed cats, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks, owls, chicken snakes and rat snakes do. The snakes are only an issue when the poultry are very young and small. Ours have a very secure coop with doors that are closed/latched at night and a fenced-in run. I turn them loose to free range during the daylight hours most days, but not if there are predators around.

So, if you get chickens, prepare ahead of time to protect them or you'll lose them very quickly.

Your husband reminds me of my dad. We always had a dog when we were kids, and hamsters and fish and stuff, but he did not want a cat. He absolutely did not want a cat. Then, a stray showed up and we started feeding it. Of course that cat became an outdoor pet that was allowed to sleep in the garage, but it had distemper and we had to have it put down after we'd only had it a few months. Dad surprised us by showing up with a kitten to replace that cat....it was a gray half-Persian which we named "Fluffy" for obvious reasons. She became Dad's cat and was the only one, other than him, allowed to sit in "his" recliner in the den. It was just funny that the man who didn't like cats ended up with a very spoiled "Fluffy" who loved to sit in his lap when he was home, and in his chair when he was gone.

Deer are creatures of habit and, once they get in a particular habit, it is hard to change their habits. By putting out deer corn near their deer trail all winter long, I've "trained" them to stay back on that part of the property, which is far from the garden, and have only seen a deer on the edge of the woods near my garden a couple of times this spring.

Some people keep deer away by playing a radio (this works best if you can run an extension cord to power it unless you want to buy a lot of batteries) near the garden. You run the extension cord out to wherever you put the radio (our neighbor puts his radio in a tree), put the radio in a large zip-lock bag to keep it dry and put it on a talk radio station.

Our neighbor has used the radio technique for many years to keep the deer from eating the apples off his trees. After we put up our taller fence last year, though, the deer came and ate his garden....including nibbling the okra down to about 2" from the ground. So, the radio didn't keep the deer out of the garden but it kept them out of the apples and the apple trees are right beside the garden. He has a 3' tall fence, like ours used to be, that kept the deer out for years, but it doesn't work now that the deer can't get into our okra.

No matter what you use to keep deer away--whether it is a spray repellent (which haven't worked long here), radio or other noise maker, water sprinkler like the one you described, etc., the deer quickly get used to it, so you have to change tactics often.

At the nursery you described that doesn't have deer damage, there is some reason that the deer don't eat their plants and/or garden because if they are hungry, they'll eat whatever they find. Deer are worst in our garden when the hollyhocks or okra, two of their favorite foods, are large and in bloom. Normally, the deer don't bother our tomatoes or peppers, although they'll eat the plants....blooms, fruit, stems and foliage in early spring when they don't have a lot of other stuff to eat. The longer a drought, the more stuff they'll eat that they normally don't touch. I gave up growing hostas, daylilies and begonias because they are "Deer Chow" here. The deer used to eat the fruit right off our fruit trees, but haven't done that in years now. They used to nibble the shrubs (hollies) when the shrubs were young, but don't do that any more either.

Feeding the deer in winter does attract "outside" deer that don't live here on the property year-round, but "our" deer herd comes at specific times. To ensure that "our" deer get the food I put out for them, I put it out right about that time (they stand on the edge of the woods and 'scream' for me to feed them if I am late). After our deer herd eats, if there's any left, the other deer can have it, but they'll have to fight the rabbits, coons and wild birds for it. All the wild things are hungry in the winter months.

The way I understand it, the deer's digestive systems work differently on a corn diet and a diet of nothing but corn is not good for them. I feed our herd a mixture of deer corn, hen scratch and black oil sunflower seeds. For the most part, the deer revert back to their regular diet once the winter ends, but every now and then one comes to the yard looking for a handout. And, I am not putting out enough feed for it to be the "only thing" they eat all winter--it just supplements their regular, but sparse, winter meals.

Lately, I've seen deer come through the yard and walk right past the crows' piles of hen scratch and into the adjacent pasture. Then, the deer stand there in the pasture and eat native plants. So, given a choice they will eat what is better for them. I assume that they travel past the feeding area in summer just because it is a route they are used to.

My favorite part of the deer routine is when they bring their babies here to show them off. Often, I am in the garden working and I look up and a tiny fawn on wobbly legs is standing there looking at me. The doe is not in sight. After a few minutes, though, the doe will come back and get her fawn. This has gone on for years. I don't know if they are bringing the fawns to "show them off" or if I am supposed to "babysit" the fawns while the does do something else. Either way, though, I love it when they bring their babies around.

Dawn

My husband looks for the deer every day. I don't think he realized that I and our dog chased them away one day. He said to feed them if I want, but to me that is another bill at this point, although corn is cheap. how much do you have to feed 3 deer? I found this article on the web about corn:

http://www.austinwildliferescue.org/html/body_corn_is_not_for_deer.html

just that i bought 3 expensive rambling rose bushes, and they are eating those roses, not to mention the knock outs. if the rambling ones got big enough they couldn't reach them all, i think. as for the knock out roses, i am not fond of them.

i am mostly into herbs, and so far they don't seem to like those. a friend gave me a lot of day lilies and stella de oros and hostas, but i don't care about them either. i really like native plants and have many of them and my herbs. my garden club friend that gave me the lilies and hostas is constantly trying to get me to put in flowering plants. lol. the knock outs were her idea too. not that it doesn't look nice, but i feel in love with our property because it looked like a wild field, not knowing at the time that it was mostly beautiful poison ivy and honeysuckle. so i am out nurturing other plants that have come here on their own. but i do love ferns, and i hope the deer don't.

that radio is a great idea. we have one on the porch that my husband plays during the day.