Wild Honey Bees at Coral Pink Sand Dunes

It took us over six hours to find the hive. It was early October and we were just a few minutes north of the Utah Arizona border on the buffy orange sand at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park (in Kanab County, Utah). The sun had been up for an hour or two when Braiden spotted the first honey bee. It was visiting rabbitbrush flowers, intent on finding nectar and not giving a whole lot of thought to the human following along with an insect net in hand. 

Within moments, Braiden had the insect in his net and was slowly coaxing the angry insect into a wooden container half the size of a shoe box. Once inside, the bee moved to the back of the box where there was light. It was hoping to get out, but in vain. The light was coming through a plexiglass window and the bee was now trapped. Braiden then quietly placed a small bee comb filled with a high concentration of sugar water near the opening and then shut the door. When he then placed a cloth over the window, the box became dark inside and the bee slowly worked its way away from the window to the sugar water.

This is the method developed by George Edgell of Harvard University a century ago, and later optimized by Thomas Seeley of Cornell University. Edgell was a professor of architectural history that happened to love looking for wild bees. His slender book, The Bee Hunter, described his use of the bee box and, perhaps just as importantly, it was used by Seeley many years later who optimized the method through a career studying wild bees in the Arnot Forest near Ithaca, New York. 

Braiden and I decided to make our own boxes based on Seeley’s design. We were impressed that it worked so well even though we were novices and had never followed wild bees before. We knew that we could capture honey bees and get them to drink sugar water. But, before using Seeley’s box, we had not succeeded in following the bees to their hives. I knew that we (humans) have been hunting for bee hives for thousands of years. I imagined that finding them here in Southern Utah would be a good challenge but intuitively doable. It turned out to be quite a bit more challenging than I expected. I gained a new respect for our neolithic ancestors. 

According to Eva Crane, humans have been following wild honey bees for possibly 7,000 years. Rock paintings in the Old World show humans climbing spindly ladders and hanging on ropes in precarious positions in order to get at the honey. One picture I particularly like is on a vase from the Etruscan city of Volci showing mythical honey hunters in a cave on Mount Dikte. A few men (without loincloths) are carrying what look like torches while illuminated bees fly around their heads. 

These examples are all from a time before we developed skeps or wooden hives to keep the bees closer to home. Of all the pictures in Crane’s book, one of the most compelling looks very much like honeycombs on the walls of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia. It was painted by some of the first city-dwellers of our species - at around 6,600 - 7,000 BC. It is evidence that we have had a sweet tooth that we were willing to get stung for - and for as long as we have been gardening. And maybe even for a lot longer than that.

But what about using honey bees to help pollinate our crops? If the part about finding hives to get honey goes back thousands of years. The part about managing bees as pollinators is harder to track. It probably goes back thousands of years as well, but we can’t say for sure. It may be that we have been manipulating pollination for only a few hundred years. 

This hidden history is harder to track because farmers don’t typically write books. The story is also complicated because it involves more than just placing hives in orchards or around gardens. It also includes the honey bees that have escaped from our semi-domesticated and handmade hives and have taken up residence on their own wherever they can find a suitable cavity with a suitable hole - Meaning an entrance that allows them to protect themselves from the many creatures that want to eat their honey, their brood, and even their sisters. 

Sometimes these wild colonies find a tall tree with a hollowed-out core. A woodpecker hole, perhaps, or even a piece of rotted heartwood from a broken branch. The bees like to be well above ground level where it is harder for mammals such as bears to find them, or to leverage their weight against their home and break inside to get at the honey. In urban areas, bees have been known to start a colony on their own in old abandoned houses, or in the eaves of apartment buildings. Most cities have a beekeeper or two that can be called on if a colony-forming swarm happens to converge somewhere that causes panic. After all, hundreds (even thousands) of bees landing on your back porch can feel like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. 

In Utah these wild honey bees are poorly known. We occasionally have a determined beekeeper that will move hives to a wild place in order to crossbreed domestic bees with wild drones. But that is about it. In Arizona Gerald Loper, Steve Tabor and a dedicated team of bee enthusiasts have located several wild honey bee colonies in the Sonoran Desert. These bees are mostly found in rock cavities with only a few establishing colonies in old walnut or mesquite hollows.

Our first effort in Utah suggests that the wild honey bees here are also finding suitable nest sites in scrubbier habitats. I assumed that they might also be nesting in rocks. But it turned out that I was wrong - at least on this occasion. After Braiden’s single captured bee had taken its fill of sugar water, it flew out of the bee box and proceeded to circle the area as it flew higher and higher into the air and then headed off to the west and away from the dunes. 

After a few minutes, the bee returned and a pattern of feeding from the bee box, flying off to the west, and returning was repeated several times. The area to the west of the dunes is dominated by pinyon pines and junipers. These trees are substantially shorter than the high canopies of the eastern forests where Seeley did most of his work. It is also an area of small cliffs and broken rocks and we assumed that the bees would have greater luck finding cavities here than in the relatively smaller trees. 

Once away from the sand, Braiden (and his wife Keesha) continued working with their bee box and following the flight path along a road paralleling the cliff (and paralleling the road to the park). I decided to head towards the cliffs and see what I could find. I also set up a bee box and began tracking bees closer to the rocks. 

In Seeley’s account of finding wild honey bees, he makes a point of placing a drop of paint on the backs of some of the bees. He does this in order to time individual bees. If the painted bee takes several minutes to leave from the bee box and return for more sugar water, then the hive is likely to be over a mile away and may be difficult to find. As the bee hunter moves along the bee line, however, and the time is lessened, the bee hunter knows that the hive is not far away. 

Both Braiden and Keesha following their bee line, and I (following mine) were watching bees return to the bee box after just two or three minutes. We knew we were getting close to the hive, but as beginners, we weren’t quite sure of when we should leave the boxes and start canvassing the area looking for hives. 

I was scouting among the rocks and even started climbing the more accessible parts of the cliff, but without success. Ravens and scrub jays were wondering what I was up to. They circled above the trees and hopped from pinyons to junipers scolding me. Even a flock of bushtits flew out of their way to see what I was doing. 

Back at my bee box, I found dozens of bees loading up on liquid sugar but I was having a difficult time determining the direction of their flight home. The problem was that I was too deep in a small wash and there wasn’t enough of a blue horizon to see the bees once they flow just a few dozen feet away. A few dozen feet, I might add, is quite a distance when you are staring at a cliff or a pinyon copse as background. 

So I loaded my bee box and supplies into my bucket and found a broken part of the cliff that was only 50 feet high. Using my old insect net (that I have fashioned out of a golf club) as a walking stick, I scrambled to a place that had more sky to look at and then reopened the box. By now the afternoon was turning into evening and I had been out for over six hours with only a bit of water to drink. I was getting tired, but the bees seemed to be flying to the east now. It seemed that I had over-shot their hive while climbing. 

I was about to call it a day and come back later to start again when I ran into Braiden and Keesha just over a small hill. Their bee box was full of bees and, perhaps more interesting, the bees were heading south. We sat and watched the bees come and go so quickly that we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave just yet. We now had three different directions to consider and our best guess was that the hive must be somewhere on the cliff and not very far away. 

We weren’t all that excited to try our luck scrambling back down the cliff, but we decided that a general reconnaissance wouldn't hurt. No sooner had we started looking around when we found it. Bees were flying at a regular pace in and out of an old juniper. It was actually at the base of the tree right above the rocks forming the beginning of the cliff. Some years ago (probably many years ago) the tree had split at the base leaving a cavity into which the bees had settled. 

I scooted under some old branches to have a closer look and in my excitement managed to smash my head on a snag. Braiden and Keesha were just as excited and decided to celebrate the way newlyweds are wont to do. We had just succeeded in finding our first wild bee colony. It wasn’t in a tall tree, nor was it in a rock cavity or a walnut burl. It was in a place that looks a lot like Southern Utah - an old juniper surrounded by sage and rabbitbrush. The big question remains in the back of our minds: where else might they be hiding?

References

Crane, Eva. 1999. The world history of beekeeping and honey hunting. Routledge, New York.

Edgell, G.H. 1949. The bee hunter. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Lloyd-Jones DJ, St Clair JJH,Cram DL, Yassene O, van der Wal JEM,Spottiswoode CN. 2022 When wax wanes:competitors for beeswax stabilize rather than jeopardize the honeyguide–human mutualism.Proc.  R.  Soc.  B289: 20221443.

Gerald M. Loper, Diana Sammataro, Jennifer Finley and Jerry Cole. 2006. Using Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) to Relocate Feral Honey bees in Southern Arizona, 10 years after Varroa infestation. USDA Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, Tucson, AZ.

Seeley, Thomas. 2016. Following the wild bees, the craft and science of bee hunting. Princeton University Press. 

Seeley, Thomas D. 2019. The lives of bees, the untold story of the honey bee in the wild. Princeton University Press.

Dusted Bees

 I recently found myself early in the morning in a parking lot next to the Virgin River with an hour to spare. The sun was just creeping through the eastern hills and the good people of Saint George were largely asleep. It was the weekend and the parking lot was nearly empty. An old man driving a big red dually was the only other person around. 

It was a chess tournament that brought me to Saint George. A few weeks earlier our SUU chess team was invited to a tournament at Utah Technical University. Our players were eager to participate but because chess is a niche game, we are not supported by university athletic funds and so have to pay our own way. This shoestring existence occasionally has its perks. It sometimes takes me to interesting places where I don’t have to feel guilty looking for insects and birds, since I’m covering all the travel costs myself. This particular morning it found me in an abandoned field by a parking lot where the only insects I could find were honey bees.

I don’t normally give honey bees much attention. They are not native to Utah even though we recognize them as our state insect. A few of my entomologist friends go so far as to call them an invasive species. I disagree. They do compete with our native bees in places, but the American West is not their ideal habitat and they have not become “weedy” in any significant way. We lack the many hollow tree trunks that are their preferred nesting sites in out-of-the-way places. We also benefit a great deal from their pollination services. Many varieties of apples, apricots, peaches, etc., bloom when our native bees are still sound asleep in the early spring. Only honey bees (with their winter store of honey and pollen) are available to do the work.  

Even though it was still early, the temperature was in the high 60’s and the desert air was moist from recent rains. I was hoping to find a few morning wasps, or beetles perhaps, but not much was out except a handful of mushrooms that were pushing through the hard-packed soil between tumbleweeds and clump grass. And so I started following the bees. 

They were visiting large white jimsonweed flowers (Datura stramonium) that were still wide open. This was their chance, I thought. Jimsonweed flowers would seem to be a significant source of nectar and pollen to a lot of desert species. They are beautifully trumpet-shaped and noticeable from a distance. The only trouble is that they remain open primarily at night. Diurnal pollinators like most bees don’t have much of a chance. It is the night-flying hummingbird moths with their long tongues that get most of the nectar.

But these early-rising honey bees also seemed to be getting their share of the flowers before the large white petals closed up for the day. It was a narrow window of light and open flowers when the hummingbird moths were no longer active and couldn’t push them away. 

As I watched I didn’t see the bees digging deep into the corollas after nectar. They were clinging to the long styles and seemed intent to just hold on, nibbling now and then at the cream-colored stigmas that were holding the pollen. It also seemed to me that they were getting drunk. 

A casual observer might think they were just cold. After all, they weren’t very active. A lot of flower-visiting insects can be easily approached in the morning because cool temperatures make it very difficult for them to move. Often they spend the night on the petals and wait for the temperature to rise to an acceptable point. This is usually in the 60’s or 70s depending on the species. Seeing honey bees moving slowly on a big white flower in the morning might seem natural. And I have to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to it at first.

But honey bees don’t follow this pattern - at least not when they are sober. It occurred to me as I was wandering from flower to flower that they don’t sleep outside. They spend the night in their hives protected, and warming themselves, by the side of hundreds (maybe thousands) of their sisters. So if you find a honey bee on a flower in the morning, it means that it flew to that flower fairly recently. Realizing this, I started paying closer attention to their behavior. 

And their behavior was odd. Not only were they slow moving but they seemed oddly tentative about flying - as if they wanted to move but that something was holding them back. When they did manage to launch themselves into the air, they looked like miniature ravens being blown around in a windstorm. They pointed themselves in one direction but were flying in another.

Honey bees sometimes fly this way. If a foraging bee happens upon a rich source of nectar, she will lift her heavy recently-filled abdomen somewhat deliberately from the flower and fly in circles or figure eights as she slowly lifts herself into the air. She is memorizing the location of her find and sometimes does fly backwards or sideways as she does so. Once she has fixed the location in her find into her insect-sized brain, she flies in a more direct way back to the hive to inform the others. But what I was seeing was different. I watched as bees would start to fly and then bump into a leaf before getting above the flowers. Sometimes they would lose their horizontal position and veer one way or another. 

Bees don’t fly this way when they are visiting different flowers. Sometimes it looks like they are half jumping and half flying but their movement is more directed. They are looking and smelling for flowers that have sugary rewards. The bees I was watching emerge from the jimsonweed were acting in ways that were known bee behaviors but in ways that were out of context. And I started wondering if they really might be drunk or somehow intoxicated.  

I didn’t have time to continue watching. The chess tournament was about to start and I had to hurry back into town. It turned into a fun event. We won most of the matches and every player was a good sport. Not everyone, however, was entirely magnanimous. During the fifth and final round, as our third strongest player finished his game (and won) I mentioned to him in a hushed tournament-appropriate voice that our team was finishing strong. He jokingly replied that he hoped our top players would lose or tie their games. He was suggesting that he might end up placing higher in the tournament if they performed poorly. And, in fact, there were a couple of scenarios where their losses could have played out in his favor.  

I wasn’t amused. My priorities, as the team's coach, was for the entire group to do well. I smiled noncommittally and continued to encourage our other players in the only way I know how: quietly and with attention observing their games. The thought of teammates lacking social graces, however, was still in the back of my mind.

Then I remembered the dusted bees flying haphazardly and bumping into leaves. They were not managing their social lives very well either. They were stuck on flowers that offered them treats but that were altering their brain chemistry. Instead of flying back to the hive where sister bees would unload their sugary loads for the benefit of everyone, they were struggling to find their way. 

I suddenly felt sorry for my gifted chess player. Like most of his colleagues and friends his life was deeply embedded in the gaming community with its brain-altering addictions. I knew that on many occasions, he was unable to break free of the computer screen. Like the bees, his personal intoxication was keeping him from feeling part of our team. 

Bethany Teeters and a few of her associates noticed that when honey bees are exposed to certain insecticides, they don’t move as much. Not only are they more hesitant to fly but they also stay for longer periods of time near a food source. This seemed to be the behavior of the bees I was watching. Was it a general pattern for other species as well? 

Jimsonweed is a member of the nightshade family - a group of plants that are known for making all kinds of protective compounds that are harmful to animals. But since honey bees are not native to North America there seems little likelihood that the two species have been adapting in any meaningful mutualistic ways. Perhaps the plant was getting pollinated, and maybe the bees were eventually finding their way home. But the whole situation was out of context. An insect from a distant land was getting intoxicated on a native plant in a weedy field next to a desert parking lot. What a tragedy of errors.

Jimsonweed poisoning interferes with nerve cells. In high enough concentrations it is lethal. Unfortunately it is also hallucinogenic and the concentration separating dangerous amounts of the toxins and the psychological effect is fairly small. 

In 2015, Sean Spina and Anthony Taddei reported on a case of teenagers being admitted to emergency care after eating several hundred jimsonweed seeds. They experienced visual hallucinations for sure, but also became disoriented, began mumbling incoherently, and their eyes became less responsive. Knowing that the plant can also cause delirium and even seizures, doctors kept the patients under supportive care and administered activated charcoal to mollify their digestive discomfort. They were fortunate and recovered. 

Bees and humans are not related other than by the fact that we are both animals. Even so, if you compare the DNA of small fruit flies (the so-called insect lab rats in the genus Drosophila) and humans, it turns out that we share roughly 60% of our genes. This means that most of our metabolic pathways are the same - including some of the ways we process nerve signals. 

For hundreds of years the Navajo have recognized both the narcotic and hallucinatory nature of jimsonweed. They left it alone because it could be dangerous, unless someone was a victim of theft. If the stolen item was valuable enough to risk getting sick, the victim would first make an offering of turquoise and pollen. Then a small hole would be dug and a section of jimsonweed root would be removed. The piece had to be at least several inches long but not long enough to kill the plant. 

After chewing half of the retrieved portion, the victim would soak the rest in water for several hours before drinking the solution. Within a few hours one of three things was expected to happen: the victim would “sleepwalk” through the village and stumble upon the stolen item or the thief; the victim might hear voices (sometimes plants began speaking) giving directions to the find; or, more commonly, the victim would fall into a trance and see the stolen item or the thief in vision (Hill, 1938). 

I can’t help but imagine - somewhat facetiously - if the poor honey bees were not having dreams of nectar-filled flowers. More relevant, perhaps, is the realization that plants and animals have been elbowing each other around for millions of years in order to make a place for themselves in a challenging world. Plants don’t offer up their goods for the fun of it. 

Living in a world that has large corporations spending billions of dollars trying to sway our minds with modern forms of narcosis, I can’t help but see a cautionary tale in the jimsonweed and the bees. Maybe the Navajo had it right. We should only partake when we really need to. 

References

Decourtye, A., & Devillers, J. (2010). Ecotoxicity of neonicotinoid insecticides to bees; Chapter 8 in: Insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, 85-95.

Hill, W. W. (1938). Navajo use of jimsonweed. New Mexico Anthropologist, 3(2), 19-21.

Raguso, Robert A., Cynthia Henzel, Stephen L. Buchmann, and Gary P. Nabhan. 2003. Trumpet flowers of the Sonoran Desert: floral biology of Peniocereus cacti and sacred Datura. International Journal of Plant Science 164(6), 877-892. 

Spina, Sean P. and Anthony Taddei. (2015). Teenagers with jimson weed (Datura stramonium) poisoning. Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, 9(6), 467-469.

Teeters, B. S., Johnson, R. M., Ellis, M. D., & Siegfried, B. D. (2012). Using video‐tracking to assess sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 31(6), 1349-1354.

Weiler, Elizabeth. (May 19, 2023). The Beehive State is ranked among worst beekeeping states, kslnewsradio.com. 

Wink, M. (2018). Plant secondary metabolites modulate insect behavior-steps toward addiction?. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 364.

Wheeler Peak

 

Darkling summer clouds and lightning bolts

Three ravens tacking through the storm, appearing

            in and out of mist

            as if to gather poems from

            a concentrated sky

And hail, uncertain of its gravity, just

bounces off their feathered backs

 

The heaving lungs, the throbbing legs, are

            finally listening to the higher gods

Protected by old shattered stones, where snow

            just barely melts

Where percolation steeps

 

Alone

 

And covered from                  

the air

            the cold

            from wind that tears at tearing eyes

 

The sundered firmament unfolds

A mountain river being born

Mormon Crickets on Redcloud Peak

 

The San Juan wilderness of southwestern Colorado is an alpine wonderland. The view above treeline is enough to convince anyone that you are on top of - and free of - the world. Mountain peaks, for as far as the eye can see, appear to be holding up the sky as so many stanchions of stone guarding the lower regions of Earth. 

I have just spent two days in the Redcloud Peak wilderness breathing clean air and hiking at 14,000 feet - a combination that leaves me exhausted and yet full of a spiritual vitality I come to crave - a combination of sensations that I find hard to explain yet one that is so addicting to my boys, my brother, and me that we return to experience it year after year. 

Every peak we climb is different and every year brings new surprises. This year (2023), the Southern Rockies experienced a wet winter, and the summer monsoon rains have been above average in many places. As a result, the wildflowers in the high country are in full show clear into August. Stopping to take breathers along the trail, my eyes wander over endless miles of peaks in all directions. 

Then my eyes adjust from taking in panoramic vistas to noticing small things below my feet. There are dozens of grasshoppers walking and jumping in my vicinity. Then I notice a few that seem heavier and are not so active. Most are underneath shallow grasses and clovers. Many are bearing sword-like blades at the end of their plump bodies. The closer I look, the more I realize that they are everywhere. There must be many thousands of them within just a mile or two of where we sit. 

They are Mormon crickets (Anabrus simplex) and the slopes of Redcloud Peak seem to be their favorite place on the planet. They aren’t swarming and eating each other like they do lower down when conditions are just right - and making a pest of themselves. Up here they seem to be an integral part of the alpine ecosystem. 

Maybe it is the wet year that has brought them out in such numbers. Or maybe they have been happy up here for thousands of years. It is clear that the population is healthy. There seems to be a good amount of genetic diversity among the individuals, at least their many color forms seem to suggest this. Some of them are grass green, others a deep earthy red. Many are the typical olive green and brown of their cousins lower down. Some are almost black. 

These darker forms make me stop to think - something that the body doesn’t naturally want to do at such heights. I have been watching insects, in the Utah and Colorado Rockies, for a handful of decades and am used to coming across the beautiful and solitary light green crickets. Sometimes these solitary individuals come in reddish or various green forms. 

The longhorn cricket specialist Darryl Gwynne (along with Patrick Lorch, 2000) put it this way: “Solitary Mormon crickets do not form moving bands, have a cryptic green or brown coloration, and are found from sagebrush flats to alpine meadows. In contrast, gregarious individuals are conspicuous, dark-coloured insects from sagebrush habitats.”

This description is certainly consistent with my own experience. I recall the first time I witnessed a Mormon cricket swarm. Kathy and I had been married less than a week and were traveling in Colorado on our honeymoon. As we crossed over the state line, just a few miles east of Dinosaur National Monument, we were forced to slow down. The highway was slick with dead cricket bodies. Going slowly, I could tell that they were Mormon crickets. Some were moving methodically across the highway but many were not moving at all. They were too busy eating their smashed siblings on the road. 

We got out of the car and looked around. All of them were dark. Some were a deep olive green, and some were almost black. The danger on the highway looked like it would only get worse until all the crickets were run-over and enough time passed to degrade their bodies. It was clear that the swarm wanted to move in a single direction, but as some of the crickets got smashed, the others couldn’t refuse the free protein snacks. When they stopped to eat, many of them got run-over as well, and the situation only got worse. 

My first encounter with a solitary Mormon cricket was on Antelope Island (really a peninsula) on the south side of Great Salt Lake. I was a high school student (in the 1980’s) and my friend invited me to go exploring the island with him. His dad was following a community treasure hunt that he thought led them to the peninsula, and they had an extra seat in the car. I don’t think we ever found the treasure, but I do recall finding dozens of scorpions by turning over flat and partially-buried stones. I also found a green Mormon cricket at the base of some clump grass. It left an impression. 

Mormon crickets are culturally important in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints (nicknamed Mormons) has a monument to an event in Utah history when gulls came from Great Salt Lake and gorged themselves on a huge swarm of the crickets - saving their crops. 

I still remember details of that solitary cricket on Antelope Island all those years ago. It was a female with a long sabor-like ovipositor (its egg laying organ). I knew enough entomology at the time to realize that it was an adult because only adult females have ovipositors. But this confused me because I also noticed that it didn’t have any wings, and I knew that adult insects (especially grasshoppers) are able to fly as adults. In fact, this is how you can tell them apart from the immature nymphs. I would later learn that this has been confusing to others as well. In fact the confusion has made its way into the story (even the myth) of Mormon crickets in Utah.

Several accounts suggest (or state outright) that the crickets flew into the Salt Lake Valley and started to devour the settlers’ crops. This is obviously an impossibility since Mormon crickets don’t have wings. When I learned about this as a freshman at BYU, my professors thought the confusion was started by accounts of the crickets descending like a “shadow of a cloud.” Coming down from the surrounding foothills, their dark bodies might suggest such an image if there were enough of them - and all accounts seem to agree that there were more than enough. 

Chad Orton writes of an interesting account of a woman named Sarah Peterson salvaging her damaged crops in the 1850’s. Her husband was away from the farm serving a mission for their church when the crickets came. Orton describes their arrival writing that they, “descended upon the fields.” 

The word “descended” is not necessarily incorrect in this context but it can have a couple of meanings. Perhaps it means that the crickets hopped to the valley from the surrounding hills (a likely occurrence). It could also mean that they flew in from the sky (an impossibility as we have seen). Orton did not invent the usage here. Various accounts of the story had been using the word “descend” for decades. Unfortunately, the word is sometimes changed to “fly.” My professors were suggesting that the “shadow of a cloud” had been shortened to just a “cloud.”   

My guess is that the confusion comes from another place altogether. I think it is a failure to distinguish between two different orthopterans: a grasshopper and a longhorn cricket. The grasshopper being the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) and the other being the Mormon cricket. 

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the American West experienced many locust swarms. These insects did fly into fields from the sky and ruined many crops throughout Utah. Jeffrey Lockwood (2004) writes engagingly of the struggles of early settlers to deal with the swarms both practically and in religious contexts. 

The Rocky Mountain locust is a grasshopper and doesn’t look anything like a Mormon cricket - at least to me. But then I am an insect taxonomist and am trained to notice differences. It isn’t as big as the infamous locusts of the Old World that emerge from sub-Saharan Africa every so often to devour crops. But its overall appearance is similar: short antennae relative to the body length and long flying wings. 

Looking at the accounts in Lockwood’s book, it seems that the Utah settlers knew the differences between the two kinds of insects well enough. My guess is that the later authors and motivational speakers did not. Part of the problem may be that the Rocky Mountain locust no longer exists. It went extinct sometime during the early 1900’s, whereas Mormon crickets continue to swarm into rural areas on occasion - but only by hopping along the ground.

I think there is another connection between the erstwhile American locust and Utah’s history. It has to do with the emphasis that members of the Church of Jesus Christ place on food storage - at least in Utah. Lockwood cites a couple of early Utah sermons (by Brigham Young and Heber C, Kimball) about needing to lay aside food as an expedient against locust outbreaks. These sermons used the Biblical accounts of resting the soil every seven years (and even during a 50-year jubilee). The implication made by both Young and Kimball was that the saints were not following this religious injunction. If farmers had been in the practice of storing food and resting the soil with no harvests, as the Biblical account requires, the locusts would not become such a scourge - or so it was implied. 

The connection between the locusts and storing food disappeared at the turn of the 20th Century after the locust went extinct. But the emphasis placed on putting aside food for a rainy day has remained. It was preached across the pulpit during church-wide conferences when I was young (during the 1970’s and 80’s). It was less discussed as the Church became larger internationally and it became known that storing food was illegal in some nations. This didn’t stop local congregations in Utah, however, from continuing to teach about the need to store foodstuffs. 

During the covid years, there was a subtle shift in this emphasis. General church leaders began again to suggest that having a store of food on hand was a wise (and inspired) thing to do. After all, the Church had never denied that its earlier teachings were out-dated. I’m not suggesting that preserving food is a uniquely Utah phenomenon, or that it necessarily presumes a Biblical commitment. But perhaps an entomologist living in Utah might be forgiven for seeing part of a religious practice tied to the biology of an orthopteran insect.

Some of these stories occupied my thoughts as I walked around Redcloud Peak discovering the crickets on the mountainside. It took me a couple of hours to get to the peak and back down to the wildflowers. But it slowly occurred to me that I was seeing several color forms and that this might be unusual. I also had to convince myself that the crickets were not swarming. 

Non-swarming Mormon crickets that haven’t been startled, tend to stay in one place or only walk (or jump) when moving to another feeding location or to find a mate. This is one of the reasons they are rarely seen. The eye doesn’t normally notice camouflaged insects that don’t move. The Redcloud crickets were behaving this way. They were not moving en masse by the thousands. There may have been thousands on the mountain, but you had to go looking for them. Once you had a search image, however, they turned out to be abundant.

The fact that there were definitely non-swarming dark forms near the typically-colored and solitary green forms was certainly new to me. I have never even heard of such a thing before. Is the Redcloud population a genetically diverse group of individuals from which other forms have evolved? I’m not sure, but it seems that there is a story here that might be interesting to pursue - providing the curious researcher has the motivation to climb a few thousand feet up a mountain.

References

Bailey, N.W., D.T. Gwynne and M.G. Ritchie. 2005. Are solitary and gregarious Mormon crickets (Anabrus simplex, Orthoptera, Tettigoniidae) genetically distinct? Heredity 95(2), 166-173.

Gwynne, Darryl T. 2001. Katydids and bush-crickets, reproductive behavior and evolution of the Tettigoniidae. Comstock Publishing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London. 

Lockwood, Jeffery A. 2004. Locust: The devastating rise and mysterious disappearance of the insect that shaped the American frontier. Basic Books, New York. 

Lorch, P. D., & Gwynne, D. T. (2000). Radio-telemetric evidence of migration in the gregarious but not the solitary morph of the Mormon cricket (Anabrus simplex: Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae). Naturwissenschaften, 87, 370-372.

Orton, C. M. (2019). Those They Left Behind. BYU Studies Quarterly, 58(4), 4-47.

Wasps on Grand Mesa

Traveling along Interstate 70 in western Colorado, Grand Mesa rises as a magnificent tableland to the south of Grand Junction. It is unavoidable to even the most indifferent traveler - not because of its height, but because of its heft. One notices its horizontal profile - not an obvious trait of many other peaks in Colorado. And it is framed by a vast western sky. Panorama mixes with montane grandeur as a compromise between elevation and expanse. 

The interstate corridor of Colorado is one of the most awe-inspiring drives in the country. Timberline is visible all around, above an endless forest of spruce, fir, and pine. Clear white-water rapids filled with melting winter snow rush through sheer canyons. The experience goes on for hours and feels something like vertigo, but in reverse. The head gets dizzy from looking at the canopied heights.  

But by the time you get to Grand Junction, the topography is beginning to hint of western deserts. Now the many mountain peaks top out below tree line and are often without snow. The wandering gaze is pulled inexorably to the south and the green mass of Grand Mesa. 

Many mountaineers judge a mountain by its peaks. I certainly understand this pretension. Looking at a looming cliff or alpine summit, I can’t help but wonder if a 60-year-old man might find a route to the top with just a walking stick and a healthy amount of grit. But I am also a biologist with a history of looking closely at small animals - especially insects. And even though Grand Mesa doesn’t fill the true alpinist with dreams (after all, it doesn’t get much higher than 11,000 feet, which to a Coloradan is hardly worth mentioning) it certainly awakens the imagination of an entomologist who likes to climb mountains. 

Part of the appeal is that Grand Mesa is one of the largest flat-topped mountains in the world, with over 300 lakes and ponds, most of which occur above 8,000 feet. Fish in these waters have plenty to eat, and fishing boats abound as soon as the lakes are free of ice. But because the lakes are typically small, large boats, water skies, and other noisy vehicles are missing - at least much of the time. An entomologist can go quietly about his day looking for insects.

Dragonflies and damselflies flit about the margins looking for mates and picking off emerging mayflies and gnats - fueling their aerobic figure-eight nuptials. Females then touch their slender abdomena lightly over the surface, dropping one egg at a time into the cold water like a fairy queen wanding her minions. The cool mountain air washes over the summer traveler as both nepenthe and need. 

I woke up early and shook the drizzling puddles from my tarp. The western sky was turning coral. Syrphid flies started repositioning themselves on the honeysuckle leaves, eager for the sun to lift them back to life. There is much to see when looking for insects during the warming of a mountain day. 

I found the northern paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus) covered in dew on top of hemlock flowers - caring, not at all, that insect-eating birds had already begun to feed. Most of these birds have learned to leave these brightly colored and stinging insects alone. They are black with thin yellow bands and noticeably different from their saffron-colored congeners lower down. At 9,000 feet, they are darker, and more affined with their northern cousins. They seem somehow less menacing. I summon the nerve to pet one large female on her fuzzy thorax and wish her a happy day. 

It isn’t often that I get the chance to be so bold. But it is obvious from the chilly air and the open flowers that the wasps are not ready to be aggressive. They are still half asleep. I also take the opportunity to touch the wasp for another reason: Polistes fuscatus (this wasp species) is known to recognize faces. I don’t mean that they will ever recognize my face (although I smile half believing that this possibility does exist). But a fascinating study conducted two decades ago by Elizabeth Tibbetts at Cornell University showed that northern paper wasps do, in fact, recognize their sisters. 

Tibbetts noticed quite a bit of variability in the yellow markings on their faces (and abdomena). Other parts of the body had more regularly colored patterns. The variability suggested that wasps might be able to recognize individuals based on these patterns just like humans recognize individual faces by differences in facial features. 

Risking a number of unwanted stings, Tibbetts went out with her research team and collected 259 adult wasps from under the eaves of houses and barns in the Ithaca (New York) area. They then painted delicate yellow markings to some of the wasp faces, and obscured some of the existing yellow markings with black paint in others. Other wasps were painted on parts of the body other than the head. Then all of the wasps were returned to their colonies. 

What the researchers found was that the wasps that had their faces altered were not recognized by their nestmates. When they returned to the nests, they were attacked and otherwise harassed until the other wasps eventually came to acknowledge their identity. The wasps that were painted in non-facial regions did not receive the same aggressive treatment. 

These findings help explain one of the problems with paper wasp taxonomy: I mean the difficulty in defining species. In 1940 Joseph Bequaert at Harvard University published a study of paper wasps where he looked at thousands of specimens from across the country and decided that there were only four species. This came as a bit of a surprise because there had been many more names proposed in the literature. Entomologists, seeing the variability in color patterns, had recognized a number of species - quite a few more than just four. 

Bequaert recognized that there were a lot of color patterns within the four defined species but that these patterns did not justify the creation of new names. Taxonomic “splitters” before and after Bequaert’s time have insisted otherwise. And the uncertainty remains. Today we recognize more than four species. But the reason for the variability is becoming clearer. The color patterns are likely due to the fact that these wasps are social animals and the variability helps them recognize each other individually. They seem to be quite a bit smarter than we used to think.

Unfortunately our native paper wasps are struggling in many places all across the country because of an Old World species that arrived on the east coast in the late 1970’s. The invading species is the European paper wasp (Polistes dominula). It is affecting many of our native species in a number of different ways, but the one species that seems to be struggling the most is the northern paper wasp, including my new friend up here on Grand Mesa.

The two species don’t seem to be hostile to each other even though their ranges overlap in many parts of the country. But the European invader is four to five times more “productive” than the northern paper wasp (Gamboa et al., 2002). I place the word productive in parentheses because it is a suspect word. It is used in the literature to mean that worker wasps are produced earlier than native wasps, that foraging rates are higher in the invasive species, and that queens have a higher rate of survivorship, etc. 

But the distinction needs to be made between this so-called productivity and the broader benefits of a species that is adapted to its native environment in less “productive” ways. For several centuries now (since the Protestant reformation and the industrial revolution) we have given ourselves license to invent and otherwise alter the world with no other justification than that our efforts represent progress (sensu ipsum). 

There are numerous similarities between this so-called human progress and the characteristics that make for a successful invasive species. The fact that the European paper wasp is more productive in this sense than our native species and is more “successful” in producing offspring only make it more of a problem here - more of a threat to the balance of local ecosystems. Productivity in this case - not unlike the human example - has become the primary means of unraveling ecosystems.

The European paper wasp has occupied nearly every state (in the United States) and province (in Canada) in just 40 years and the damage it is causing has not yet been fully assessed. In my own backyard, I have discovered six nests this year alone. I was able to destroy three of them without risk of being stung. The others will have to wait until winter because of their size and location. 

Fortunately, these troubling thoughts are only vaguely in the back of my mind up here at the top of Grand Mesa. I have not seen a single invasive wasp up here in the two days I have spent looking for insects. I have to admit that these wasps are not actively hunting even an hour after sunrise. Scientists seem to be right - many of our native species do appear to be less “productive.” 

Maybe part of the reason is that it is still chilly up at this elevation. But I can’t help but feel that the mountain itself prefers to remain a bit sleepy. The only ones pushing to get an early start seem to be the humans eager to catch non-native fish that have been introduced into artificial reservoirs. 

The first time I ventured into the lake country of Grand Mesa was an unforgettable experience - but not in a good way. It was during the heat of the summer back in the 1990’s, and my friend and I had driven from Salt Lake City (Utah) to the orchards around Hotchkiss (just southeast of Grand Mesa in Colorado). We were doing an experiment to see if we could control some of the pests of fruit trees that are common here with a seed extract from the neem tree. Our goal was to replace some of the harsh synthetic insecticides with an environmentally responsible alternative. 

And we didn’t want to spend money on a hotel so we had planned ahead to sleep under the stars somewhere on Grand Mesa. By early evening, we found ourselves tired from the work of the day but also refreshed by the cooler air of the high country. We found a pull-off, grabbed our packs, and started along a short trail. Then as we hiked, the mosquitoes began to gather around us. 

I noticed them first near my legs. Then the bolder ones cued into the carbon dioxide in my breath and I could hear the high-pitched buzzing around my head. We began swatting them with our hands and our hats. But in the end, The mosquitoes won. We had not come prepared for the endless clouds that followed us wherever we went. They nearly drove us crazy.

But now I am fully prepared. The many dozens of lakes and ponds up here are obviously a perfect place for a semi-aquatic insect like a mosquito - an insect, that is, that lives in the water when it is young and then on land and in the air as an adult. In fact the habitat is so obviously perfect for mosquitoes that I am a bit embarrassed by my lack of foresight all those years ago. 

This time I have a small head-size mosquito net, a baseball cap, a hoodie, and gloves. Many of my friends and colleagues apply thick amounts of repellent to their skin and clothes. I have a different method that obviates this sort of chemical bath. After setting up my cot, I first put on the baseball cap in its proper position with the visor over my eyes. This will become important as it keeps the mosquito net from touching my nose and giving the mosquitoes a point of entry to my skin. Then comes the hoodie (fully zipped up) with the hood itself covering up the baseball cap in the back. The long sleeves also protect my arms. Then I put on the gloves, making sure that my wrists are covered, and then place the mosquito net over my head, making sure that it doesn’t leave any exposed skin around my neck in front. 

Wrapped up in all of this, I lay down on the cot and completely relax. I can see and hear the mosquitoes all around and my instinct is to panic. I swat at the mosquitoes until I remember that I don’t have to. I am protected. I jokingly tell myself that this ought to be an induction activity (or some other form of psychological testing) for anyone truly wanting to make a career in public lands. Passing means that you can answer the following question affirmatively: can you fall asleep to the sound of buzzing mosquitoes?

As my body slowly adapts to the fact that these mosquitoes can’t hurt me, I am able to enjoy the night air and the milky way high overhead in the black sky - so bold and bright and far away from the hubris of artificial lights. Sleep comes more quickly than I want. But, then again, maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be up here on Grand Mesa. I am certainly less productive. I think I am also more at peace with the world.

References

Bequaert, Joseph C. 1940. An introductory study of Polistes in the United States and Canada with descriptions of some new North and South American forms (Hymenoptera; Vespidae). Journal of the New York Entomological Society 48(1), 1-31.

Gamboa, G. J., Greig, E. I., & Thom, M. C. (2002). The comparative biology of two sympatric paper wasps, the native Polistes fuscatus and the invasive Polistes dominulus (Hymenoptera, Vespidae). Insectes Sociaux, 49, 45-49.

Henderson, J. (1923). The Glacial Geology of Grand Mesa, Colorado. The Journal of Geology, 31(8), 676-678.

McCarraher, Eugene (2022). The enchantments of mammon: how capitalism became the religion of modernity. Belknap Press, Harvard University. 

Tibbetts, E. A. (2002). Visual signals of individual identity in the wasp Polistes fuscatus. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 269(1499), 1423-1428.