A Wasp in January????!!!!

I found this Thursday morning in the parking lot of my dentist's office. 

So let's talk about entomology and climate change.

This past week I took part in a webinar about pollinators and climate change. One fact that stood out was that insects and bugs come out of hibernation based on temperature. Warmer weather = insects thinking it's spring and so they pop out of hibernation after however many days they are biologically supposed to after a cold period amount of time. Invertebrates life cycles are temperature dependent. When there are higher temperature days, this leads life cycles to speed up. What does this mean for us? It means that we can see more life cycles of insects in one season than before - so maybe multiple rounds of ticks, multiple rounds of Japanese beetles, multiple rounds of wasps, multiple rounds of other pests that can damage gardens, crops, trees, etc... And as we see here from this picture - our growing Zone in the Twin Cities has moved to Zone 5 which means that our average lowest temperature is warmer than before meaning we will absolutely see insects earlier than we have before.

So. Yikes. I'm not looking forward to tick season again this year.