We’re hosting this month’s Grandview Garden Club meeting on Zoom. The meeting will start at 7:00 p.m. to accommodate our speaker, entomologist and wasp expert, Rob Longair who will be joining us from Ontario.
Rob has spent almost half a century studying insect behaviour, ecology, and diversity, including doing field research in Canada, the western United States, West Africa, and Belize. He developed an appreciation for what E.O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world” during an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University and has focused on insects ever since. He is particularly interested in the behaviour of solitary and social wasps, although he concentrates on solitary species, which are less likely to sting him. After retiring from a faculty position at University of Calgary, where he spent 27 years teaching a wide variety of courses, his favourite of which were field courses, he returned to the Ottawa area where he grew up. He now lives on an acre and a quarter, which he has allowed to revert to meadow from its formerly manicured state. He currently volunteers at the Canadian National Collection of Insects and Arachnids in Ottawa.
Here’s a description of Rob's talk, “Wasps in the Garden: The Furies, Pest Control, or Just Doing Their Best To Make More?”:
For many people, the sight of a wasp brings nervousness or, at worst, sheer terror. Will it sting me? What good are these things, anyway? Tonight, we’ll see if we can answer those questions and a few others. What, exactly, is a wasp? How do they help maintain populations of pests (real pests) in the garden or fields at numbers that allow us to grow what we want, at least most of the time. We’ll take a look at some species of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects, some that make nests by themselves and store food for their young, or the most familiar, and most feared, that live in groups of mostly sisters and feed their young with vast quantities of insects, many of which would be eating our flowers and vegetables. No, they aren’t all our friends, doing just what we want. And yes, we’ll even mention those big, disturbing hornets that have recently been identified not too far from Vancouver.
Zoom start time this month will be 7:00. We will be meeting on Zoom and our meeting link will only be sent to current members. If you'd like to join before the meeting, we'll send you the link.
(Note: this will be our last meeting via Zoom for the time being. Next month we will return to in-person meetings at the Britannia 55+ Centre. Our start times then will be 7:30 P.M. because there’s another Britannia program in the space that ends after 7:00. Once we’re meeting face-to-face again, we can resume the $4 drop-ins so people who aren’t yet members can come to the occasional meeting. We had to suspend drop-ins during Zoom/Covid, so it’ll be good to have them back. Do bring your non-member friends from April onward.)
Cheers,
Penny
PS - Our GGC Annual Plant Sale will be on Sunday, May 14th, at our usual venue on Rose St. If you are dividing plants or starting seedlings this spring, please pot up any extras for the sale. We’ll provide more details in our April meeting message.
Please note: We will not be able to accept plant/soil donations from any members who live in the Japanese Beetle regulated area west of Clark Drive.
And plan ahead to join us for our East Vancouver Garden Tour. We’re once again having it on Father’s Day, which, this year, is Sunday, June 18th. Please note it on your calendar and we’ll tell you more about it soon.
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