Nature at Home Introduction

Our Nature at Home series of articles and associated videos is being created to provide information covering everything from agriculture and landscaping to environmental protection in an effort to make our actions more ecologically friendly as we face a time, due to climate change, where 40% of our land based ecosystems will move from one type to another, including our own.

In our efforts to find specific environmental information, we found many scientists take specific, local studies and overgeneralize those findings to the world at large. Even when those specific studies are good overall, projecting the results onto the world at large can cause unscientific over generalizations, particularly when ecological context is ignored.

That is why we will be providing the most up-to-date information we can find from specialists that perform their studies and research in the Neotropics specific to the area the article is addressing along with the results of our own studies.

3 Things You Can Do to Help Native Bees

Did you know that some 4,000 species of native bees live in the U.S. and Canada alone?

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Neem Oil and Other Pesticides

Azadirachtin, is one of the prominent biopesticides commercialized and remains the most successful botanical pesticide in agricultural use worldwide.

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Agricultural Importance of Carpenter Bees

Rachael Winfree, an ecologist and pollination expert at Rutgers University who was a senior author of a paper published by the Royal Society stated, “Wild bees are often more effective pollinators than honeybees, but research has shown several species are in sharp decline.”

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Ladybugs and Lady Beetles

Ladybugs prefer to eat aphids and will devour up to 50 a day, but they will also attack scale, mealy bugs, boil worms, leafhoppers, and corn ear worms. They dine only on insects and do not harm vegetation in any way.

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Critters in the Leaf Litter

Many of our tropical trees lose their leaves at different times through the year. These fallen leaves are called “leaf litter” and offer plenty of benefits to the soil and native wildlife!

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Tank Bromeliad

Bromeliads comprise an entire order of flowering plants called Bromeliales, native to tropical North and South America, which also includes some of the most interesting plants of the rainforest—the tank bromeliads.

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Composting for Garden & Environment

For many gardeners and farmers having rich compost is essential to growing healthy crops. Harnessing microorganisms to break down materials like fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, leaves and grass clippings produces a rich material that can be used in yards and gardens. Compost can greatly improve the health of the soil, especially benefitting sandy or clay soils.

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Hummingbird & Bananaquit Nectar

Hummingbirds feed on flowers, at your feeders for the sugar water (nectar) and on small, soft-bodied insects in much the same manner as flycatchers. Much of their diet is made up of small arthropods such as fruit flies, gnats, mosquitoes, aphids, spiders, caterpillars and insect eggs. This enables them to live for extended periods without nectar by quickly converting fat reserves and recently ingested bugs to energy when deprived of nectar.

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