Farmers Weekly Review

I don’t know about you, but besides the fall garden tasks, I am also getting my house ready for winter. Furnace clean and check, caulking any crack or crevice, getting out the covers for the lawn furniture and enjoying every minute of my favorite season.

And for most people, their clothes closets and drawers lose the shorts and tanks in lieu of the flannels and wools. As for me, it is shorts and tanks year-round; I have chosen the “internal sweater” of fat to keep me warm, but we are warm-blooded to start with.

What about all those that are cold blooded?

If you don’t remember that 4^th grade natural science lesson, warm-blooded animals like mammals and birds are able to regulate their body temperatures for the most part. Not so for the insects, reptiles and amphibians.

Cold-blooded animals are at the mercy of the outside temperature. Have you ever seen a fly in February outside? It seems warm to us at 40 degrees, but the fly is in slow motion, desperately seeking out every sunny spot. Because no warmth, no movement, no ability to find food. What type of nature strategy is this? You are little, you can’t move, so you become someone’s lunch.

But nature is ever marvelous … ah, that evolution. Insects have developed different ways to make it through winter. And it is fascinating! Science is still working to understand really most natural phenomenon, but for overwintering insects there are four basic strategies: run, hide on or in ground, hide in water, change their “outfits,” and the most fascinating of all, changing their body liquid to antifreeze (propylene glycol).

The most visible and easiest to recognize is the choice to run or fly. Migration. Many of our animals are like the people we know who are “snowbirds.” They spend the summers here, but when winter comes, they move to a warmer-weather area to wait out the winter.

Monarchs are our most vivid and, if you are lucky to witness, most extraordinary example. Migration overall is still poorly understood. Science has done all sorts of manipulations, but the need to migrate at a certain time, is hard wired and strong.

So the fourth generation of monarchs (those we see in late August through November) are called the “supergeneration.” While the other three generations of monarchs live four to six weeks, the supergeneration lives nine months.

This fall monarch flies 3,500 miles to evergreen forests (oyamel firs) in Mexico. Eastern monarchs that is. These monarchs spend their summer, reproductive days as far north as southern Canada. And as they migrate, they gather into larger and larger groups, creating one of the most amazing sites, if you are ever lucky to see it.

Monarch roosts are gathering of monarchs into larger and larger groups as they head for warmer winter. I have borne witness to this event, and it is magical. And again, science is still scratching their heads as to how.

Some of our pest insects migrate too, preferring to go down south to continue reproducing and then in spring literally blow back on those spring strong wind fronts. Some of these pest insects include some grain beetles, armyworms and earworms.

But not that many insects migrate. Instead, they have developed strategies like us Midwestern hardy folks do: We hunker down. But how do insects that can’t turn their body thermostat up, and are soon not going to be able to move, manage?

They are shapeshifters. Nature has figured out the best part of their lifecycle that can outlast winter. Back to butterflies (and moths), many don’t migrate and overwinter in their perfect sleeping bag, their cocoon/chrysalis. Something you might want to familiarize yourself with is the different looks of the cocoons.

The photo I featured here looks like a fairly large (for a cocoon) old wrinkly brown bag. Don’t put those out with landscape waste. That is the cocoon of our largest moth, the Cecropia moth. If you spread out your fingers as far as you can, the Cecropia adult would cover your whole hand surface.

Other insects burrow down below the frost line. Have we even had a hard frost line the last couple years? That is still up for debate. But the insects know. Insects like grubs and ants use this strategy.

And important garden pest, the spotted or striped cucumber beetles overwinter as adults under leaf litter. Knowing this is a major way you can decrease this bacterial wilt-carrying pest for your garden next year. Clean up the garden debris this fall.

Many gardeners prefer a spring cleanup, mostly because that is what their parents did; or let’s face it, some people are just done with outside once Jack Frost comes a callin.’

But I encourage gardeners to at least clean up a part of their garden in the fall, not only to avoid creating a Holiday Inn for those cucumber beetles, but it also gets you ready to plant those early spring crops if we have a wet spring.

The most fascinating way insects handle winter is by changing their body chemistry. Literally. They create their own antifreeze. The interesting thing is people assume insects literally freeze to death, but that isn’t all together true. What happens is that when they get cold, the water inside insects freezes. It is when the warming occurs, that the now frozen insides burst.

So, how could insects possibly battle this force of nature?

They actually create chemicals that avoid this rapid change. Just like the antifreeze/coolant in your car’s radiator controls your car not freezing up or boiling over. Sugars and other carbohydrates (trehalose, mannitol, or glycerol (a sugar alcohol) prevent the formation of the deadly ice crystals, thereby cheating a winter death.

They create these chemicals before winter comes. This amazing chemical magic show lowers the freezing point of the body fluid. These insects tend to winter in cracks and crevices of natural materials to further help insulate them.

So, if you have ever been told that freezing flour will help you to avoid that pesky pantry pest, the Indian Meal Moth, but when you try it, you still get the moths. Now you will know to freeze the flour quickly, then defrost quickly.