all right everybody good morning thank you so much for being here um in case you uh just wandered in you are here at the Veterans Memorial Park smart rain Garden pollinator monitor training um so if this is not where you were trying to be today welcome anyway if this is where you're trying to be today you're in the right place um I just wanted to thank you all for taking the time to come out and learn about this project going on in the city a lot of our project partners and kind of the significance of pollinators in our community especially you know as a as a built out bear Island community um Bard county is just a really beautiful biodiverse place so learning about these types of um flora and fauna and how they kind of help benefit our environment is really great my name is Lexi Miller I work here with the City of Cape canaval we have a few other partners that'll introduce themselves a little bit later on um and they're the subject matter experts when it comes to this kind of stuff I love listening and then paring uh it's really great to learn about I love participating um I'm maybe not the person to ask all of those questions but we have some really awesome like I said subject matter experts here today this is just kind of our our itinerary we're going to be going over some introductions what Lagoon friendly Landscaping is um the basics of butterfly identification we'll have a a break for lunch um some Basics on bees uh the plants and pollinators that we see in the Veterans Memorial Park smart Garden which I'll be talking about what that project is if you haven't heard about it yet what happens next and then what our surveying looks like I know we're a little bit dicey with weather potentially so we might have to Pivot this afternoon you know Florida is going to Florida's going to Florida uh but we'll figure it out and we'll we'll make that call once we get a little bit further along with the day all righty so kind of the the bring it back to the basics of why we're doing this project um so the Veterans Memorial Park smart rain Garden is located in what's known as a presidential streets neighborhood in the city it's a very residential very paved very built out area of the city uh kind of an inherited geometry is what we might call it in in on staff in that in the mid-century mid 1900s um you know we had the space race going on we really just wanted to get people to the moon so we had roads houses infrastructure going up not really thinking about what does this look like long term what does it look like during big rain events and due to that kind of oversight that that not so much of a consideration during that time period we are now dealing with uh what I call rainy Tuesdays which are just kind of these really heavy events that don't necessarily have like a name attached to them like a hurricane uh that cause some some flooding some Street flooding in our in our streets um the storm water system is pretty regularly overwhelmed so what you'll notice is that essentially it'll rain the street will flood it'll stop raining the water will sit around for a little bit and then it'll drain so it it during that time period where we're not able to move that water and it's still raining is when it creates a threat a flood threat to property to cars to to land um and in really really intense events you know it can be a safety issue to address this systemically right because it's kind of stretched in multiple parts of the city we came up with what's known as the presidential streets master plan and if you look on the screen above me and as well as over there you'll see that the presidential streets is outlined in that kind of more highlighted yellow area so that includes a lot of our beach ends it includes basically everything from A1A all the way past Ridgewood um highly residential a lot of it is in a flood zone according to FEMA map spe special flood Hazard areas and what our presidential streets master plan does is put improvements or plan for improvements in those neighborhoods that not only help with things like storm water and flood mitigation but also some pedestrian and bicycle facilities a little bit more beautification um and that a lot of that came from the surveys that we've done in the past with the community to see what it is that they feel they can do to thrive in their neighborhood you know is it shade trees is it slower speeds is it flood control is it all of the above and how do we kind of come to those Solutions uh with infrastructure improvements so that's kind of what's happening on land in our neighborhoods and here a lot of people tend to ask you know what does that have to do with the Lagoon a lot lot of times you might hear about storm water Lagoon storm water Lagoon what's the connection well everything that rains you know that falls from the sky hits the ground here ends up in the lagoon it goes Underground through our storm water inlets through a pipe and then into what we call an outfall into the Indian River Lagoon we have one at the Center Street um Center Street park that's that uh services our Center Street um Center Street Basin uh and that's a big portion of the presidential streets neighborhood so a lot of that gets filtered through or rather not filtered through put into a pipe and then out to the Lagoon now since about the 1980s um early to mid1 1980s the state municipalities Counties have worked to create cleaner cleaner outfalls right so we have treatments that we put in um a lot of them are nature-based some of them are more hard infrastructure so we've been cleaning that water for a number of years a number of decades now um but what we're finding is that we're still getting that flooding right some of those issues that we saw in previous pictures um so in the diagram above me you can see you know you have that residential runoff rain falls down it hits hard surfaces like driveways and Roads and sidewalks and roofs um and then that enters our storm water system and outputs to the Lagoon where pollinators come into play are things that we call nature-based Solutions so recreating or emulating natural processes through construction right so our Veterans Memorial Park is a pretty good example of this and that has a lot of nature-based solutions to some of our flooding issues um it's often called a rain Garden or a bio Swale where rain will fall we'll put it in either a low portion of an area or we'll maybe build a low portion of an area filter or drain water towards that it'll percolate or soak through the soil and the natural process um a lot of times it's microbes in the soil that eat excess nutrients or pollutants or it's uh plants that will uptake those extra excess nutrients and thrive in those types of conditions um will serve to remove pollutants from the water so we're again emulating that natural process additionally that volume that ends up in that low area in that Garden or in that bio Swale is volume that does not go into the storm water system so it's water that ends up here and soaks into the ground which is a very natural process that's been happening for ever and ever versus running off of a road into an inlet into a pipe and then out into an outfall so it kind of creates a separate bucket to put that water so that we're not having as much flooding and so how this kind of ties into the Veterans Memorial Park smart rain Garden project uh is that about two years ago the city well a year ago the city was awarded a million-dollar Grant from the National Science Foundation which is an organization uh headquartered in DC that gives out these grants um through something called the Civic Innovation Challenge so the Civic program that Partners research institutions with communities to address community problems with community-driven Solutions so the solution of the um smart raid Garden at Memorial or Veterans Memorial Park came from a series of surveys Outreach events workshops and feedback collected from the community about what was the number one concern in your area and what are the ways that you would like to see it address so we had subject matter experts project Partners come out to the community host these events uh give a really kind of basic 101 on things like nature-based Solutions so rain Gardens SES green streets uh to learn about these and say hey what do you think fits in your neighborhood what do you think looks good what are your concerns with these types of um this type of infrastructure this type of solution and what would you what do you think would be successful what would you want to see every single day and so we came up with a smart rain Garden something that was highly native um highly hostable for pollinators some something that you could take a look at and say wow that's really beautiful kind of any time of year something that was a little bit rewilding right Florida has a really kind of excellent climate for for being green year round maybe not colorful year round but at least green year round um things that people could learn about and take back to their own yards obviously not to the scale of this but something a little bit emulat easy to learn about easy to identify as well that's really nice and um appreciated in the community uh these are pictures of the garden right when it was installed I think there's been a little bit of growth on some of those plants that you'll see there um but if you haven't had a chance to pass by it we'll hopefully have one today weather permitting um but it's a really it's really kind of been been beautified you can see some um renderings so in the far corner there's a rendering there there's a rendering here and right here I think the real thing looks better these were created prior to construction during design just to kind of give people an idea of what it's going to look like um the real deal is is it kind of blows these out of the water these are beautiful we appreciate them they're great um but the real deal is really kind of uh taken off and is is really gorgeous when it comes to the benefits of this type of rain Garden um they're pretty they're pretty kind of numerous right so we we create space to host Wildlife so things like butterflies bees Birds these really beneficial um pollinators really beneficial fauna in our area um we improve water quality right so those those um those plant roots can uptake nutrients as well as we're taking water off of the road that would typically enter our already overwhelmed system and putting it into a natural process into a nature-based solution uh and then it's also nice right it's kind of nice to not just see something that looks like a storm water infrastructure you know if I said to you yes we're putting in storm water infrastructure at veter Veterans Memorial Park you'd probably be pretty bored but if I said we're putting in a smart rain Garden we're going to monitor how well this type of solution works it's going to be beautiful it's going to be seasonal it's going to host all of the things that we love to see like birds and butterflies and bees um that's a lot more appealing it makes you want to walk by it versus if I say hey there's a piece of infrastructure you should go check it out it's not quite as exciting um so being able to kind of add value and uh aesthetic to the community as well as flood mitigation pollinator population support you know we're really kind of looking to to hit a few Nails on the head here this was a really big project um it's still ongoing it doesn't the cycle for it doesn't close technically until the end of this fiscal year so September 30th um we are moving into the monitoring phase this is what this Workshop is all about again a community-driven solution for a community identified challenge relying on citizens and the community to help us understand what's out there how successful it's been um count and ID some pollinators uh it can really kind of lend some insight into what the benefits are and being being able to show those benefits with data um as well as with Community engagement uh so these are actually just a few of the project Partners on this screen there's been a whole host of others um if there's any questions about the project before we kind of move into introducing some of our other project partners and talking about you know DS the Department of Environmental Protections pollinator program I'll be happy to answer it um but like I said we got some really Rockstar partners and subject matter experts today so I'm sure they'll have they'll have much more interesting stuff to ask questions about okay if not then I'm going to go ahead and bring up Holly and I don't Mandy I don't know if you're coming up as well um Holly and Mandy are from UF ifus and the seant extension and they'll kind of talk a little bit more about um the project and our partners here at uh here with the Department of Environmental Protection thanks Lexi um yeah so like um Lexxi said I'm holia beels I'm with University of Florida IAS extension and Florida seant and my colleague Mandy Bailey um we are um as part of this project um de helping or developing along with DP the monitoring pollinator monitoring program for this project um so Emily's going to come up in a minute and talk about um the Indi noral Lagoon aquatic preserve and the pollinator monitoring project that she started um in Titusville at their office and since I have learned about this project I thought this would be a great way to maybe move her monitoring program to this new Garden um and to get the community involved as Lexi said a big part of this project since the beginning has been talking with community members and getting feedback and information about what it is that you guys all want to see and to try to engage community members as much as possible um in this proess project and having community members go out and actually look for pollinators butterflies and bees in this case is a great way for you guys all to be engaged in the project and to tell others about what it is that you're seeing um and we have um since the completion of the project seen already tons of pollinators at the site so it's it's a great way to kind of see how that progresses um over the time frame of the project um and into the long term as well so because as the plants grow um we're going to be seeing lots of changes and it'll be nice to see kind of how those what happens um not only when this project ends technically in September but um further on um in the years as long as people want to continue to be engaged um so today what we're going to be doing is um actually talking about what this monitoring program is going to look like how you all will be involved and you'll be learning a lot lot about butterflies and bees probably more than you even thought you could possibly know about butterflies and bees um and so to help us with that part I'd like to introduce um Emily sermont um with the um Florida Department of Environmental Protection indur Lagoon aquatic preserve um and she's going to introduce um not only her program but talk a little bit more about how this um pollinator monitoring program started um at hertis SP Office so all right thanks Holly um good morning everyone you're going to hear me talk a lot today so sorry but it'll be some fun stuff uh so really quickly I'm just going to talk about who I am and who I work for and kind of why we're here um so I actually work for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection so you've probably heard of us uh state parks are run by d uh also all of the permit for let's say new communities or for us specifically we have to look at a lot of Permitting for docks and things on the Indian River Lagoon because I do work for The Aquatic preserve so we have environmental permitting you know air pollution uh we have a whole department for that water quality um state parks anything that really has to do with managed land and environmental resources in the State of Florida D handles um we are Partners our sister organization you could say it's FWC they handle wildlife in species specifically whereas we look more at habitats and environmental health um and then specifically I work for The Aquatic preserves office so we have 42 aquatic preserves throughout the State of Florida at the moment um how many of you have heard of The Aquatic preserves okay those are the people I expected to know about the Aquatic preserves um so we're kind of um a program that not a lot of people know about but like I said we have 42 throughout the state and we actually have seven within the Indian River Lagoon so if you look on the screen above me or over on the other side of the room all those areas in yellow are R seven Indian River Lagoon aquatic preserve so you can see our furthest south is all the way down in Palm Beach County down in Jupiter Northern Palm Beach County area and our furthest North is mosquito Lagoon in valua County so those aquatic preserves span almost 100,000 acres um and there is myself my cooworker tiza and then three other folks that manage all of those areas and work on projects throughout all those yellow areas there um we manage over 150 of the spoil Islands so if you all have ever been out on a boat and visited any of the islands in the lagoon we manage those for recreation and conservation and most of the things we do are in the lagoon so seagrass surveys oyster Reef monitoring um a lot of bird nesting monitoring some Turtle stuff so mostly biological and habitat monitoring within the IRL and then we decided we were going to move Upland so um we mentioned a little bit so far this morning that connection between land and Lagoon coming from runoff entering the system so that's sort of what led the Indian River Lagoon aquatic preserves to start focusing a little bit on our Uplands um the I'm going to skip ahead a little bit just kidding I'm going to skip to here so um you can see the three basins of the IRL on this slide and the Watershed for those three basins is is quite large so our Watershed for the IRL is actually the it's larger than the state of Delaware so a huge land mass that most of us live in um if you live in Cape canabal you're definitely part of the Watershed if you live anywhere on marit island you're definitely part of the Watershed and even land to the West on the mainland um up in the northern lagoon area The Watershed isn't as wide you're part of the Watershed if you're in Titusville proper and cocoa proper gets a little skinnier in that northern part but once you get down into the southern part of the IRL like around Stewart and Fort Pierce that Watershed goes all the way west to the edge of the map so really really large land mass that when rain falls within that area all that water makes its way to the Lagoon through either storm water treatment um canals things like that so as soon as rainwater hits land within the Lagoon Watershed it makes its way into the Lagoon and that's where we get a lot of freshwater input and then with that comes a lot of nitrogen pollution from Landscaping agriculture um and human waste as well so that is a big impact on our Lagoon water quality so the idea of us sort of having our own native plant garden and talking a little bit about Lagoon friendly and Florida friendly Landscaping is bringing up to the community that a lot of our water quality and water condition issues start on land with humans these issues didn't just appear in the lagoon on their own a lot of them unfortunately are tied to us than what we do um with our waste water with our storm water but also as individuals living within the Watershed what we do with our Lawns has a really big impact on the Lagoon um so we kind of chatted about this a little bit the Lagoon is a wonderful wonderful place I'm super happy to work here and this is a cool project for us um most of what we do is in water in the Estuary but um it's cool to be able to come on land and talk to everyone that lives within the Watershed and within the community and not just those folks who get time out on the water um there is a lot that's being done in addition to lagon Friendly Landscaping so it's not just all on the citizens Lexi talked a little bit about what the City of Cape Canaveral is doing um but there's also lots of action being done on the federal and state level so for D we have B Maps um and those are plans usually I want to say on the fiveyear scale three to 5e scale that are being done throughout the Watershed to kind of help with that nitrogen and freshwater loading into the system and then the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary program has their comprehensive conservation management plan that ccmp and that I want to say is more on 10-year uh timeline big changes that are going to happen throughout the Watershed and with different programmingsoftware friendly and Florida friendly Landscaping um so everyone within the Watershed if you own a little parcel of land there's things that you can do to help mitigate some of the impacts that we have on the Lagoon by trying to hold some water on your property with native plants or things like rain Gardens you can set up little rain gardens around your home using rocks and things like that when we go out to the site hopefully you guys can get some inspiration from there um but using native plants avoiding fertilizers as much as possible avoiding irrigating as much as possible if you have a bunch of plants you don't have to water them as often as you have to sod um so those things help the Lagoon immensely but another cool things that comes from Lagoon friendly and Florida friendly Landscaping is the cool Critters that you can have start to visit your landscape so we implemented our native plant garden in Titusville in September of 2021 and we used I want to say originally 23 different native plant species um and we do our monitoring there we monitor for butterflies and bees in the garden area and then we actually walk right across the street and monitor the same size area on a traditional lawn so that lawn is mowed has really nice green sod they use a lot of watering probably a bit of fertilizer and some weed killer as well so that really traditional idea of what Lawns are supposed to look like and on our side of the street we see tons and tons and tons of butterflies and bees buzzing around everywhere so many that it's hard to count and then we walk across the street and kind of see nothing most of the time sometimes we'll have some butterflies fly by but the numbers are pretty drastic um and on this slide is a few pictures of some of the Butterflies we see in our garden so these are all from our ey naturalist page that anybody can check out anytime to see what cool Critters we're getting um and then same for bees so we have a lot of diversity um of our native bees and butterflies in our garden and hopefully when we go outside today you guys can see some in the rain garden and we'll be talking about them a lot throughout the day so by the end of the day hopefully you'll um know the groups and names of all these Critters on these two slides at least there's lots and lots of them so we'll get into it later on um and now it's time for Holly are you coming back up or is it I don't yeah not sure who wants to talk now that's fine um um so we just wanted to just kind of quickly highlight and show you um what the rain Garden looked like before and after so the top right picture um is just a Google Maps image of what the landscape looked like um last July so construction of this project actually started in January um and so they um it looks very different than what it looks like here now um so the bottom picture um was actually a picture we just took like two weeks ago um so construction started in January it finished up um I believe it was like the end of March or so beginning of April we had um I I see a couple familiar faces we had a a Saturday where a couple people where community members could come out and plant like the last of the plants um into the garden um which was a really fun morning I think we had maybe like 400 plants that we had to get on the ground and it took like 30 minutes for all the people that showed up to do it and we mulched and everything like that um and so um today it looks like this and it actually just continues to grow um as um the weeks and the days go by I think every time I go out there I see something that's gotten bigger something new different pollinators um so we're really excited to have all of you come out today just to also be excited about the project and hopefully to help us um monitor those um bees and butterflies as we go through um the season so for the rest of today what we're going to be doing is we're um next going to be going into a presentation about butterfly anatomy and identification um then we will um break for lunch for a quick lunch and then in the after lunch we'll be doing the B um anatomy and identification and then that'll we'll talk after that um about what the monitoring will look like um what the serving will look like like kind of what we're thinking about um how um community members will be involved and sort of the frequency and the length of the survey everything like that um and then we'll get to go out um and actually look at the site and do some kind of practicing um and um of looking at the site and um identification um so before do anyone have any questions about what we've talked about so far this morning or about what the rest of the day will look like yes deceptive term but yeah yes yeah it is and so I mean um we wanted to make sure I guess for I don't know advertising marketing like making people kind of understand like what it is so ruing meaning like an area that has um Can accumulate um water into the area and that's where the water will kind of settle and then sort of drain back into um the ground um like Lexi was talking about earlier so that can it can take all different shapes and sizes um ours is obviously very large because it's in a park but you can have small little rain Gardens I actually was in Hershey Pennsylvania last week um and I got to do a tour of um Hershey Park um and they've installed all kinds of rain Gardens at their park to help help alleviate um storm water runoff and they had all different all different sizes so they would have just like little um Garden or little plants around like different signs where you could see there's like um outfalls of where the water can go in off the sidewalk they had much larger ones as well they had so they all different sizes and it's basically you're just trying to have the water flow into an area where it can stay and then the plants are adapted to being dry some of the time being what some of the time can help absorb some of that that water yes Dennis you also yeah so we know so we'll talk afterwards um the last presentation today we'll talk about the different plants that we do have and we I've identified the different butterflies and bees that would consider those host plants um we wanted to make sure when we um chose plants for the garden that they were all natives in general we do have canas um which technically I guess you would say would be not native um but our a typical plant you find in like wet areas um so we wanted to make sure we just included plants that um people could see um not only the beauty for it of it but also the functionality and ones that we knew that would be attractive to um different pollinators as well so yes there is an irrigation system so to get it established because usually with you the first maybe couple to six months you do need to water in order for the plants to get established and to grow um but after that really and that's just for kind of like the beginning part of the of the system um there are inflows where water will go into the system and that will be for watering the plants but we are in a little bit of a drought but once we kind of get through like the rainy season later on probably you know later this year into next drought kind of early drought season um when it's not raining as much we probably won't need to irrigate as much because the plants are native and adapted to kind of this drier weather but there is irrigation system because we need anytime you put plants in the ground you do need to water them even if they are native in order for them to kind of get established and to grow so other questions okay as we um get the next presentation up if you want to come up to this table here um we have um some clipboards and some notepads and pens and some handouts that you can take and this is where you can write notes and all the things that Emily um will be talking about um and it'll just give you a minute to kind of stand up as we get to um the next presentation so come on up and grab um some handouts um notepads if you want to just take a couple sheets and put them on the um clipboards e e e e e e e e e e I don't know can Okay can oh there we go perfect all right so let's go ahead and get started um learning a bit about butterfly ID uh I guess before I hop into that I should ask does anybody have any questions about the Aquatic preserves or de or any of the things that I mentioned earlier I didn't really take a second to see if anybody had any questions so okay oh go ahead um yeah so are you referring to the waterway that connects Lake okachobee to the East and then to the West um so the question was who has jurisdiction over that okay yeah yeah so I'm sure everyone has been hearing a lot about Lake okobe discharges um because we just had to go through some this past February I think March I don't know what month we're in right now but um so uh for the lake aobi releases it's US Army Corps of Engineers so it's federal government that oversees that um for flood control and safety and also for the health of Lake okachobee because if the lake is too high or too low it's really bad for the ecosystems out there as well um so that's Army Core that makes those decisions of when and how much water they're going to release um we at the Aquatic preserves don't have much say in that and we're very aware of how that freshwater negatively impacts the St Lucy Estuary one thing about those Lake okobi releases when it comes to us and all the areas that we manage it really only impacts one area that we manage being the St Lucy Estuary so when that water comes from Lake aobi East it goes through the St Lucy Estuary into the southern Indian River Lagoon and then out the St Lucy Inlet so it really negatively affects that region when they do those releases but it doesn't have any effect on the waterways north of there so like yeah Banana River and the Indian River Lagoon proper mosquito Lagoon there's no effect from Lake goobi in these northern areas where you know you all still get really large devastating harmful algal blooms up here but that is caused by different impacts within the Watershed in this Northern Area because that water in the South really stays down there and doesn't travel North so um I don't know if I want to say unfortunately but uh there's lots of different reasons for water quality and condition issues in different areas of the Lagoon every sort of stretch or region is different impact wise so up here you all have a lot of people on septic tanks which has a negative impact on the Lagoon because nitrogen pollution will move underground into the Lagoon from those septic tanks um yeah and wastewater treatment and storm water runoff from things like that whereas once you get down into the southern IRL there are those big impacts from agriculture from Lake a Kobi so it's different depending on where you are in the lagoon so we also have to use different solutions to address those problems yeah any other Lagoon questions because that's really my expertise [Laughter] I've gotten into bees and butterflies over the last couple years for this project but if I had to give myself a title it would be esterine ecologist um but I have fun with the beads and butterflies so I hope to introduce you all to them so you can have some fun too so today we're going to go over I would say butterfly Basics uh butterfly ID and then we'll do a little quiz at the end see if we can identify some things um so we talked a little bit about this when we were just speaking about moths so butterflies are just a group of day flying moths really they're all in the same family uh lepidoptera uh and butterflies are really just moths that are active during the day when you really break it down um using taxonomy so because they're active during the day they have bright colors butterflies also usually have clubbed antenna so you can see it on that zebra longwing um little knobs at the tip of the antenna instead of often time moths will have like feathery looking antenna butterflies usually maybe sometimes uh rest with their wings together we'll talk about that a little bit as we go through there are some groups that rest with their wings open um but a lot of times you'll see them on plants with their wings closed whereas moths usually have their wings in different positions like folded over their body we'll see pictures of that um towards the end of the presentation and we pay a lot of attention to adult butterflies but that's only one stage of their life cycle right we're all very familiar with butterfly eggs turning into caterpillars which eat all the host plants and then form crysalis and emerge as adults um so if you do end up volunteering at the rain Garden or you know you have a garden in your own lawn you might notice eggs caterpillars and Crysis especially on host plants so we have a lot of different groups of butterflies that are all on that front page of the packet and then all listed here on the slide so this is just so we're able to go through all these different groups and keep everything straight um when we're talking about butterflies we're going to use dorsal to um talk about looking at them at A View from Above ventral as in below so the ventral side of a butterfly would be where you would see its legs and its Underside whereas the dorsal would be the top where we often and see them from that view quite a bit especially in these pictures and then four wings are going to be their front wings and hind wings are going to be their back wings um I may just use above below front and back but uh dorsal ventral four-wing and hindwing would be the more official way to talk about it but we'll see how I feel as we go through um so we have eight major groups of butterflies in this region of Florida there is some Regional variation they might have some different species to the north of us and a few more species to the South but um these are the eight major groups that we would see I would say pretty much throughout Florida but especially for us in this sort of eastern central region of the state so we have swallow Tails whites sulfur hair streaks Blues metal marks brush foots um they're the largest family of butterfly so there is a lot of different groups under there and then we have our Skippers which again have a lot of different species we have spreadwing Skippers grass Skippers which there's lot of and I think they all look exactly the same and then giant Skippers so we'll dig into that so before we sort of Jump Right In morphog groups um are groups that are just put together based on how things look or their morphology so for butterflies we do sort of follow family and genuses and they do kind of fall nicely into those categories once we get into bees things kind of get all over the place um so for our monitoring that we'll use at the rain Garden and what we currently use for the D Garden is all based on what things look like so just because things are grouped together doesn't necessarily mean they're very closely related it's all just based on how things look because we're doing visual observation so we're not actually catching things and putting them under microscopes and identifying them to the species we're just saying I saw three white butterflies and then we can assume it was one out of these five uh when I go to Crunch the data later on so here's those morphog groups again again and same that's on this front page of the ID packet little notes or uh easy quick Clues to help you remember what the butterflies in those different groups look like so swallow Tails have tails whites are White Sulfur are yellow hair streaks have thin tails that look like hair um Blues are tiny and have little dots uh metal marks are also tiny and have metallic markings Leaf mimics look like leaves ladies and AD Admirals are um Leaf mimics they look like leaves but they have a little bit of flare like a lady or an admiral will I didn't name these butterflies so just bear with me some of them look like how they're described in other ones I'm like I don't see it but we're going to roll with it um heliconian and frares have long Wings we'll get into those crescents are small uh Buckeyes have eye spots so that's an easy group to remember emperors a little bit hard to remember they're just medium butterflies that are orange that have some ventral ey spots royalty so that's the Monarch group of butterflies um and then we have spreadwing Skippers which rest with their wings open so again I said most if not some butterflies rest with their wings closed this is a whole group that rests with their wings open so we have longtail spread wi Skippers cloudy Wing spread Wing Skippers and Dusky Wing spread Wing Skippers then we have grass Skippers which look like jet planes and giant Skippers which are just big jet planes so you'll see as we go through hopefully this will start to make a little bit more sense um and you'll be able to see those patterns any questions so far okay awesome so let's start with swallow Tails which have tails they're big they're large um they're usually dark colored with a lot of bright markings um there's one butterfly in this Morpho group that's actually not a swallow tail it's a red spotted purple which is a brush foot butterfly um but it does a pretty good job of pretending that it's a swallow tail so that's how it ended up in this group so swallow taals can be like I said there are largest butterflies that we have so they can be 2.5 to 6.5 in in wingspan so pass these around so this is their size range this is a little Dr as poss so for recording purposes we're passing around our size references so that's why I had to step away from the microphone for a second but um as you could see from the ridiculous size cutout swallow taals can get pretty big so now we'll just go through species by species zebra swallow tail has zebra stripes and before I really start cranking through and it seems very overwhelming you do not need to remember all these species to do monitoring either at the rain Garden or at the Titusville Garden again we're just doing everything based on morphog groups so you see a big butterfly that's bright and has these little Tails uh at the end of the Hide Wings you just write down swallow tail and that's it you don't have to remember which one it is if you do I can give you some Kudos and bonus points when I'm going through the data and be like oh they got it to a species but even then I'm probably just going to uh when we do calculations put it as a swallow tail and not even to the species so you really don't need to stress out about it at all again it's just swallow tail check and that's it so Eastern tiger swallow tail has Tiger stripes pipe vine swallow tail um has this dark coloring and there's a couple of these swallow tail or swallow tail mimics that try to act like pip Vine swallow tailes because these are actually uh butterflies whose caterpillars eat I want to say it's birth wart but a plant that has a toxic compounds so that when Predators go to take a little nibble of the butterfly it doesn't taste so good um so we have multiple butterflies that act like a pipe vine swallow tail like this one spice bush swallow tail um also they're all just hopping on the poison a bandwagon here um giant swallow Tails really large has this signature sort of X on the fourwing Eastern black swallow tail um if you I can make these PowerPoints available for everyone especially if you monitor for us so you can use them as guides and click through them anytime and they have as you can see these indicators on the slides to show exactly this dot means that it's this species and then this coloration here but for the sake of time and for us all not to get bored to death I'm not going to go into all these intricate little marks we're just again going to get the idea of all these butterflies are swallow tales and that's what we're going to write down on the data sheet uh palomi swallow tail again big beautiful dark colored you can see on this slide it's pointing to that bar there for this species poly damus swallow tail and then here again is our little weirdo I guess that doesn't belong in the swallow tail group um it's our red spotted purple so this is actually a brush foot butterfly which we'll talk about a little bit later but as you can see in that um bottom right photo with the Dark Wings and the bluish color they can be easily confused with swallow Tails they just don't have the little tail at the bottom um but had a friend actually that just saw one of these the other day and she is um really big into butterflies very passionate and she Mook it for a swallow tail at first so even people who spend a lot of time around these guys at first glance can think that they're a swallow tail so that's why we threw them in our swallow tail Morpho group so again if you write down swallow tail perfect that's it these guys are included in there so that's our first group swallow Tails done so again just bright colorful have those little tails at the end uh easily recognizable butterflies I would say it's only going to get smaller from here cuz those were our big guys um our next group is going to be whites so all of these butterflies are white pretty easy to remember um small to medium size and they love Sunny open areas um and we get sort of an influx of Great Southern whites in this time of year actually you've probably seen a lot of them as you've been driving around or if you've been spending time by the Lagoon there's a lot of Great Southern whes um using some of those Coastal plants as host plants oh thank you yeah perfect whatever it says on there is a size range yeah so they range from about one and a half to three and a half inches and thank you so much Holly for passing around our next um little size indicators so again when you're doing monitoring you see a white butterfly you're write down white we're good if you can get it to species that's awesome just because I think it's fun to challenge yourself and get it to species but we're really just looking for those Morpho groups so nothing crazy um Great Southern white I would say is our most common species of White butterfly that we have in the region these guys are cool if you're really trying to get to species a great indicator is that their clubbed antenna are blue so all the other whites will have kind of just black or gray clubbed antenna but these guys have that distinct blue clubbed antenna the little blue on the ends um they can have sort of these Black Wing margins um and just kind of yeah mediumsized white butterfly fly usually going to be a great southern white but we don't want to be writing species unless you're 100% sure that that's what you saw otherwise you're just going to want to write white um just so that we know that our information is accurate it's always better to be more General and write down the correct thing than to try to get specific and write down the wrong species because um we're trying to make this as rigorous as possible so that we can use the data um to show the rest of the IRL region the benefits of Lagoon friendly Florida friendly Landscaping so we want to make sure that our data collection is correct so we want to make sure that we're being again more General and correct than specific and incorrect um one tricky thing about the Great Southern whites is the females especially can kind of start to look gray um but they'll still have that blue clubbed antenna and you'll see the more and more that you're out in the field looking at butterflies you sort of start to see the body shape and the general coloring and you can start to put them in the categories it's really um experience goes a long way I would say for butterfly identification so then we have our checkered white which has Checkers we don't see this guy as much Cabbage White so our Cabbage White has um dark four-wing tips there on the edges and then these black spots and then Florida white probably not going to see these but still going to include it just in case climate change is making species dispersal a little bit funky as things get warmer so this is a South Florida species but um we'll see they have a historical record in bravard County but um we usually don't see these guys it would be pretty rare usually again it's the Great Southern white and then one butterfly that does not belong in this category but we throw into this Morpho group is the white peacock so unlike the other white butterflies these guys have a little bit more Pizzazz so they have these spots a little bit of orange coloring um more patter than the other white butterflies do but we're going to put it in this category just because it still kind of looks like them this is probably a butterfly that once you get a little bit of experience you can get down to species because it's a little bit more this distinct than the other ones but again we want to keep it General if you just write white check you're good we'll count it any questions about white butterflies okay okay go ahead okay okay so the Great Southern white can also these the um dorsal side the top view can give you more of the black some of them do look just plain white so it's probably a great southern white that you're seeing so if you look at the where is it oriented on that screen the bottom photo where that butterfly looks Pure White they look very similar to to the Florida white I can check and see if anything has been updated but as far as I know this butterfly has not been found in Bard County for a very very long time um so it's probably that's that is one thing we do a lot of this monitoring based on coloring but coloring can vary depending on the time of year that you see the butterfly and how early or late in the season they emerge so some of them can look darker like we said some of the females can look even grayish and then some of the males at certain parts of the Season can be really really white so again that's why we're putting things in morphog groups so if we're doing monitoring you just write White butterfly and you're good you're covered that's all we need to know um because especially once we get into bees you have to use microscopes to determine the difference between species butterflies you can kind of get to if you take a picture and then we go over it and we look through the ID books but um yeah definitely want to stick to the Morpho groups because those white the Florida white is really unusual outside of South South Florida currently but I'll as usual things get updated so I will double check but yeah up here we should only we should mostly be seeing Great Southern whites yeah and it's yeah it's always best to use multiple identifying characteristics so for the great southern white the antennas will always be blue that is something that you can look for um I guess with nature I should never say always but for our purposes they're always going to be blue um for that species that is a signature characteristic so the colors of the Butterflies can change seasonally and then too for us in our eyes people see colors a little bit differently so we talk about sort of body shape and outline color and then some of those identifying characteristics that are true for the species great question and I didn't really go into much basic butterfly life cycle information at the beginning so I apologize um so with adult butterflies emerging they sort of stay the same size for that adult part of their life cycle um the amount of time that adult butterflies live ranges quite a bit so smaller species usually only live about two weeks um and again it's the end of their life cycle so the purpose of adult butterflies and them emerging and suddenly having wings is for genetic dispersal and so that they can fly farther distances to mate and spread their genetics farther then if they stayed a little caterpillar they're not really getting anywhere because the egg hatches on the plant they stay on that plant and grow turning into that adult butterfly allows them to go off and spread their genetics across the region um so for small species it can be like two weeks so they stay the same size that whole time um whereas larger species in warmer climates live longer so there's a lot of butterflies in the tropics that get really large our largest butterflies in Florida hit that um six and a half inch wingspan but there is a butterfly I think in Papa New Guinea that reaches I want to say 12 Ines in wingspan so tropical butterflies can get really really big like the size of birds um and those butterflies those big ones tend to live longer another butterfly species that lives longer is monarchs because they migrate typically so butterflies that migrate live longer big butterflies live longer um but the small ones don't live as long and they all once they merge that's their full adult adult form they don't change much after that um another thing that can happen with butterfly ID is sometimes butterflies get nibbled on by birds and lizards so they could be missing that chunk of their wing that you need to identify them down to species so again that's why we use morphog groups uh caterpillars are a really important food source for other animals especially Birds without caterpillars a lot of our Birds wouldn't survive especially our migrating bird species adult butterflies aren't as much of a food source but yeah every once in a while a bird will take a nibble or a lizard or um a bigger animal like that any other questions about life cycle or butterflies in general and as you think of them ask away and I'll try to answer the best that I can so that is those are all of our white butterflies and again the white peacock is thrown in there um all those butterflies like full sun um butterflies in general love warm weather so that's why we have to do our pollinator monitoring in the middle of the day when it's nice and hot here in Florida cuz that's their favorite time of day um even though we like to hide inside in the hot summer in the middle of the day they love it so we got to get out there and check for them then uh sulfur are in the same family as those white butterflies and again they like that full sun they really like the heat um and these guys are also small so they're about one to three inches in Wings spread and their host plants tend to be PE plant species and again they can have these sort of Darker winter forms and then lighter spring forms but the general color and characteristics uh we can apply to the whole group so this one's very common we see cloudless sulfur all the time and they can be found all throughout the Americas pretty much from Canada down into Patagonia so these guys are WID spread these are this and the orange Bar B sulfur are two biggest sulfur butterflies so the these guys can look greenish sometimes um usually this kind of light yellow color decent size again these guys would be pushing more towards that 3in size um and we see these butterflies a lot I'm sure you all have seen them and after this training you'll probably notice them even more because they're everywhere um orange bar sulfur is another large sulfur there's really only two large sulfur um this one is usually darker yellow and it's found more in South Florida it does regularly Al move northward and then kind of back down um it's not considered a resident in this region I haven't seen one up here but I have seen some I believe in Fort Pierce where my main office is located so there's even a little bit of difference in that hour and a half drive from Fort Pierce to here that I'm pretty sure I've seen orange B Bar sulfur down there but um I've only seen cloudless sulfur up here I believe again but flies are hard because they're flying by really fast so you just write large sulfur on the paper write a little tally and that's it give the data to me we crunch it and then we have beautiful statistics to show people probably a couple months later because you got to give me more time to Crunch the statistics but if you guys just write large sulfur you're good now we're getting into sort of our medium or small sulfur so we break our sulfur into two categories for monitoring large and small so those are our only two large the cloudless and the orange Bard the rest of these are in the small sulfur category so they range from probably like 2 in down to 1 inch um the southern dog face so can you see the dog face on the four wings so there's a black eye and then the yellow is the dog I guess it kind of looks like a poodle with like a fluffy head um and then I say you can see the dog eye on the ventral side that black with the white dot in the middle again I didn't name these These are the names in the textbooks but that's our Southern hm yeah it's like a side profile of the yeah the mouth and the head so that's a southern dog face they would have to land for you to identify them down to species because when these sulfur fly they flutter pretty close to the ground usually the smaller ones it's very fast so you just see flashes of black and yellow um but that's our Southern dog face if it were to ever hold still for you um orange sulfur so this is different than the orange barred sulfur but again we would just write small sulfur and call it a day sleepy orange so that little tiny mark That's circled in yellow at the top of the fourwing is supposed to be a sleeping eye again I didn't name these but that's our sleepy orange I think the hindwing markings kind of looks more like a Sleepy Eye when it's closed and you can see that sort of brown streak maybe that looks like a closed eye some ey eyelashes again I didn't name these um the little yellow which is fitting the barred yellow which is also little but it has these black bars again when they're fluttering along the ground it's really hard to tell what's what when they hold still it's helpful um what's even more helpful to learn butterflies is if you can take pictures of them um but for monitoring we don't take pictures you would just write small sulfur and then dainty sulfur is the smallest um really really quite small but again when it's flying around it just looks like a little flash of yellow along the ground next I think it's my favorite group of butterflies um are the hair streaks so these butterflies have thin hairlike Tails so we talked about swallow Tails earlier that have those kind of thicker easy to distinguish Tails hair streaks are smaller butterflies they're only 1 to two inches in size and they have these really thin little tails that you can kind of see in some of these photos and we'll get into it on the other Pages um for both swallow tails and hair streaks they use those tails to kind of fool Predators or catch Predators eyes and guide them to that sort of more unimportant part of the butterfly which would be its hind wings and away from its head which would be the most important part of the butterfly um so it's sort of trying to trick Predators into thinking hey my you know nutritious head and body are down here so the bird will let's say bird will just bite the you know tail end of the butterfly and miss its head which is the most important part of the butterfly for survival um but what these guys do swallow Tails don't really do anything special with their tails they're big enough butterflies that having those tails on the end will distract Predators hair streaks are smaller so what they do which is really cool if you ever see them sitting on a plant is they move their hind Wings they'll close all the Wings together and then those hind Wings the back Wings move up and down with the little hairs on them so they're kind of shaking their bottom and moving those hairs around so it looks like their head moving around so they're trying to trick Predators so you'll see them land just kind of shake their little butt up and down it's not really their butt it's just their hind wings but it's really cool to see they're really cute they're nice and small um sometimes we see them in our garden and you guys probably will have a good chance of seeing them at the rain Garden because there's so many trees around and some of them like um bigger trees like the southern oakair streak and things like that they like a little bit more forested area so you guys have a good chance of seeing them um again we'll just run through these real quick the great purple hair streak again you can see those little tiny tails and you can see when its wings are closed how they poke out the back and they would just shake those up and down to distract Predators red banded hairst streak has red bands the Southern Oak hair streak this is another group of butterflies that gets a little bit confusing their markings kind of start to to look the same this is a white M hair streak do you see the M on the hindwing in white maybe um the gray hair streak even though they're all kind of gray or most of them are kind of gray um the banded hair streak again a lot of them have these banded patterns so we're just going to write hair streak and call it a day um the sweder Juniper Hair streak we will probably not see this butterfly um there's a few butterflies in here that we're probably not going to see but we're added in for conservation story sake so this is an endemic and endangered species so what that means is this is a species of butterfly that's only found in Florida something or a species that's endemic is only found in one region of the world and nowhere else so this Sweden's Juniper Hair streak is only found in Florida mostly the St Augustine area along the coast and it is quite endangered um it's highly dependent on Coastal Cedar and because we've developed our Coastline so much a lot of those Coastal Cedar strands are gone so for butterflies um when a species is in trouble and they're endangered a lot of times it has to do with uh the removal of their host plant so for this butterfly development along the coastlines got rid of a lot of those Coastal Cedar strands and had got rid of habitat so then we don't have have as much of this butterfly and now it's endangered so you'll see that with a couple of species that we talk about that's why um Lagoon friendly and Florida friendly Landscaping is so important for pollinators and butterflies and planting host plants and nectar plants because the number one cause of decline for butterflies at least in our region and in the US is habitat loss so loss of those host plants because a lot of times what we do especially in Florida because 70% of the state is private property people buy homes we want to have Lawns or specific Landscaping that doesn't serve these creatures um so we're taking away area that probably used to be made up of host plants and replacing them with sod or other plants that don't serve um these butterflies so that's why it's so important to have host plants but also nectar plants um to create habitat for these Critters uh like you'll see with the rain Garden if we get to go out there when you create these spaces pollinators will show up they're really good at somehow finding these Gardens and using them um if you talk to other folks who have made made uh Native landscape choices they can tell you they just show up I know with the rain Garden uh Cape canabal planted it and I came and visited probably a few weeks later and there were butterflies all over the place so it really does work it really does help even just having little planted areas in your lawn um or just some specific species that are host plants can really help out the butterfly populations this is another butterfly that we're I have not seen I don't know if um the property is wooded enough to see these guys but the Henry is Alin and then one more quick conservation story um the atala have any of you heard of atala butterflies okay awesome yeah it's a pretty cool story I have atala earrings on so um these guys are really cool I believe they're still listed as endangered um but at one point um 1888 it was considered the most conspicuous insect in South Florida so atala butterflies were everywhere all over um especially South Florida once you we're probably getting towards the northern extent of the species up here um but from pretty much here down there were at talas everywhere then due to over harvesting of their host plant so again uh this was for um using the host plant for food but we just talked about the um butter the Juniper Hair streak that we just talked about that was development based habitat l this is more um settlers were harvesting CTI for food and we over harvested and got rid of most of this butterflies host plant so the butterfly was actually thought to be extinct from 1937 to 1959 because settlers had moved into Florida and started over harvesting CTI which was used to make Florida a root powder which wouldn't spoil because there was no Refrigeration back then so I can't even imagine living in Florida with no AC and no Refrigeration um but they were doing it using CTI so um native peoples in Florida had been harvesting CI and processing it to use its flour for a really long time but once white settlers came into the state it started to become over harvested and overe exploited um and those white settlers learned how to process that CTI from the native peoples who lived in Florida or indigenous communities because it's actually a toxic plant um if you eat any part of CTI without it being processed it's actually poisonous so that is one thing if you are going to put um CTI in your yard it's a beautiful plant but just be careful if you have pets or children that like to put things in their mouths because it is poisonous um but anyways white settlers were over harvesting CTI to make a root powder um and we got we used up all that CI and the atala disappeared and was thought to be completely extinct um then we started noticing a couple come back um realized they weren't actually extinct and started planting CTI more and more throughout the state in restoration projects in landscaping projects just reintroducing that plant back into the region um and an talas have made a pretty good comeback um a great example of this is actually there's a Publix in Fort Pierce and the Publix's parking lot when they did the planting they planted a bunch of native CTI and the Publix's parking lot is Popp in with at talas they're everywhere and when I first noticed it it was when we were first uh coming up with with the butterfly programming and I noticed the caterpillars and the itellas in the Public's parking lot and I was there um with my fiance and I got out of the car and started like walking through the landscaping and like looking at all the counties and freaking out he's like get in the car you're embarrassing me get back in the car but it just goes to show that these Landscaping plantings really really work and do make a difference like I said Publix is the last place I would think to find an endangered species of butterfly but they were all over the place so it just goes to show how important these projects are and and uh tala are making a comeback um their population numbers are looking pretty good sometimes people get upset because when you do plant CTI and have a tala come in those caterpillars like caterpillars do they like to eat the foliage on the plants so the plants start to look a little rough and people can get a little upset about that but again we're bringing back an endangered species so hopefully when they see the beautiful butterflies they'll get over it they'll be okay with it MH great question so they're in the same family they're actually part of the hair streak family but they don't have little hair streak Tails so this is the one hair streak that doesn't have hair streak Tails um they're pretty easy to identify though because they have that bright orange abdomen and they're really the only sort of black butterfly with that blue iridescence that's that size so if you see in Nala you'll probably know um and there's CTI in the rain Garden so you could see some matala which would be really fun because again these are an endangered species um but yes thank you for bringing that up I would have totally forgotten they don't have the hair on their hind wings so again nature doesn't really follow the rules we just have to kind of work with it and put things in categories the best we can so that's it for the hair streaks again I think that's my favorite group of butterflies but Blues also have my heart so Blues are again a small group of butterflies but these guys are even smaller so like a half an inch to an inch and a quarter in size um blue butterflies I would say get mistak for moths probably the most because they fly low to the ground they're pretty quick um and they're just sort of you can see bluish when they're fluttering but when they land they mostly look Brown so these guys are tiny um once you see one though you'll start to notice them all over the place thanks tiza yeah yeah hopefully after this training you'll just start noticing butterflies all over the place cuz that's what happened to me once I started learning my butterfly species I never realized there were so many all around me all the time um so this is an Eastern pygmy blue this is the smallest blue species so I also brought some plant references see if I can get this guy out I think I brought a couple don't mind me leaving leaves all over the podium sorry cap can have roll clean them up when I'm done okay so if you look at the photo going to have to look on the right you'll see um the butterfly on that little purple flower and now we're going to pass around that purple flower just to give you an idea that flower looks pretty large in the picture it's not in real life it's a very tiny flower so I'll pass around that Little Flower to give you guys an idea these butterflies are quite small um Blues you can get down to species based on the number of spots that they have on that ventral hindwing so Eastern Pig Blues have four spots so that's an easy way to figure out which species you're looking at the next species cassus blue has two spots this is the only species that has two and then the soranus blue has one spot so again that's the easiest way to tell these guys apart one spot two spots four spots but again for monitoring all you have to write is blue so if you see one fluttering by you don't need to figure out which species it is you just write blue and move on with the survey one butterfly you're not going to see is the Miami Blue but again just want to talk about it for conservation reasons really quickly um so the Miami Blue again is endemic and endangered so only found in Florida also not doing very well and this is another Coastal development story so they actually do not exist on the mainland of Florida at all anymore they are completely gone from the mainland of Florida um historically they were found from Bia down into the keys so they would have been found throughout the whole IRL region but due to loss of habitat but also hurricanes and a couple other like habitat um and species fragmentation there's a couple things that went into play but again losing all the host plants along the coast or having less host plants than they did before is a main driver of decline for these guys um now they're only found in bah Honda State Park in the lower Keys it's the only place in the world that you can find them um the state park and other entities are working to bring this species back and increase their populations but right now that's the only place in the entire world that you can find them um it says on here that they that population disappeared um but there's some more updated information they are they still exist they have not completely gone extinct but you can only find them in the keys um in 2012 which was a while ago now but um back in 2012 there were 34 individuals total so this butterfly is I would say on the brink of Extinction but like I said there's lots of entomologists working to try to bring this population back up and their primary host plants are grain nickerbean balloon Vine and blackbead so all Coastal species this is a very Coastal butterfly um and we love our coastlines too so understandably when they have these specific plants that they depend on and we develop our Coast they lose a lot of that habitat any questions about that okay so those are all the blues mhm since the population is so small there would have to be a lot of work on the conservation side for like breeding and upping that population size um so I don't know where they're at right now um conservation wise so it is um ferally listed as endangered so that means there are a lot of resources going towards that species and bringing back habitat as well as like usually captive breeding and things like that when the populations are so small we do have a lot of you'll see nicker Bean on the beaches and on the spoil Islands it um I'm sure you've seen it very Pokey has a lot of thorns it hurts really bad actually if you accidentally walk into one okay thank you um so for those guys yeah I don't know what the next steps are um but hopefully we can get them back I um I had a friend who was doing some like butterfly tagging down there so maybe I can reach out to him and see if he has any info so how many Miami Blue Butterflies are found down in South Florida this is an old number so it's 2012 so it's been 12 years um but at that time they had 34 individuals yeah unfortunately I don't have any super updated information but we can figure it out yeah um maybe something great will happen but um yeah for right now I don't know what their status is now it looks like they thought that they were gone in 2010 but then still had a few and 2012 so yeah I don't know what their status is currently but again another conservation story about the importance of host plants really is the main point okay so now we moving on to our next category um metal marks so the little metal Mark is the only butterfly in this category so um that's the only one you need to worry about it has again those metallic markings um very tiny only a half an inch to an inch so about the size of those Blues maybe a little bit smaller and then we have our brush foots so we'll go ahead and go through a couple of these brush foot species and then we'll probably take a break if you guys are okay with that sound good okay move around for a second so brush foots are the biggest butterfly family so they have the highest number of species and none of them when we talk about brush foots they all look different so that's why they're all in different morphos groups um on our guides so brush foots what makes them all the same family is that all butterflies have six legs but brush foots use the front two as sort of um chemical receptor so they'll use their two front legs for tasting and they're usually shorter so they really only walk on four legs versus six so that's why they're all grouped in the same family and most of them are just kind of medium to large size butterflies um not too small not as big as those giant swallow Tails but just sort of in the middle and we'll have to break into sort of different groups for these guys so first we'll talk about Leaf mimics which you could see um at the rain Garden we don't see them much in our Titusville Garden for D because our garden doesn't have any mature trees it's full sun it's roadside it's sort of just like a wildf flower Meadow whereas the rain Garden does have some mature Oaks above the garden so you might see some of these Leaf mimic butterflies or some of the Butterflies we'll talk about that like wooded areas a little bit more so Leaf mimics are just out there pretending to be a leaf um the first one is called the question mark so that yellow circle outlines the question mark shaped marking on that butterfly but again we don't need to get down to species um this is just considered a leaf mimic so that's the question mark then we have the Eastern comma so this butterfly has a marking that is supposed to be shaped like a comma that really small white marking is its identifier so again that's why we make morphog groups and we're just going to call them Leaf mimics so you write Leaf mimic on the paper and you're good to go then I like this guy a lot he's fun we have the American snout so the big um identifier for this butterfly is actually its snout or nose so you can see kind of in both of these pictures that long its face is very long so that's why it's called the American snout and the idea we think is that that snout is supposed to look like um the part of the leaf that would attach it to the plant um and that's why they have that adaptation for that really elongated face um but again just a Lea mimic butterfly you might notice it just because of that that snout um but those are our three uh main Leaf mimic butterflies but we have one more we have the Ruddy dagger Wing So this one looks a little bit different and you can see it has those really long sort of again it's not a swallow tail but it has those similar tails and then these really intense Wing margins um so they're called dagger Wings because those long tails are supposed to look like daggers because they're really long and sharp um but those are our four Leaf mimic butterflies mhm yeah yeah so um when I have seen this butterfly in person it's smaller than a a swallow tail like significantly um in the shape of the Wings is pretty unique espe the fourwing is different than what you would see on swallow taals the best thing you can do if you see a butterfly fly by and you're like I don't know what that was but I know it's a butterfly it's to just write butterfly so that's an option for monitoring if you're walking through and something flies past you well let's back up if you're walking through and something flies past you and you have no idea what it was at all you can just write ufi for unidentified flying insect and then you have your bases covered you're like something flew past me and it wasn't a bird so you can write an identified flying insect again we want to be really Broad and correct rather than be specific and be incorrect so you have unidentified flying insect and then let's say you keep walking and something else flies past you and you know it was butterfly is so it was either a butterfly or a moth but you couldn't tell you can write let me see if I remember what the code is yeah you can write lepidoptera or you could just put moth SL butterfly and I can fix it when I go in but just letting us know you know it was either a moth or a butterfly but you have no idea which one it was so you can write that and then let's say you keep walking and something flies by you and you know it was a butterfly but you have no idea what species it was or what group it was um you can just write unknown butterfly so we have these protocols to make sure that we're staying really Broad and we're being as accurate as possible um you can write unknown butterfly and if you want add some notes in there like I couldn't tell if it was a swallow tail or a sulfur um and that way I can kind of clue in on um maybe what butterflies we need to review or I can sit there and be like I wonder what they saw and start flipping through the guide book for my own curiosity um but yeah just keeping it to that really broad category so if a butterfly were to fly by you and you're like I don't know if it was a swallow tail or a sulfur or a ruddy dagger wi just write unknown butterfly and then you can describe if you want in the notes does that make sense okay so our next group is ladies and Admiral so these are similar to Leaf mimics but they have some Pizzaz um again these butterflies seem to like wooded areas as well and are mediumsized about 1 in and 3/4 to 3 in so the American lady has um all of these butterflies kind of look similar from the top just orangish um but it's really the ventral side or the underneath side that have these intricate patterns so they have the two ey spots whereas the painted lady has four ey spots on the ventral hindwing um and again the top is just kind of brown pattern and then underneath is where you get that little bit more Pizzazz then we have the red Admiral which again just Brown and orange on top and then underneath they kind of have this pink or red band on the fourwing so you can kind of see that it's a little dull in the photo um but that is the main identifying characteristic for that butterfly and that's it for our Leaf mimics and our ladies and Admirals or Leaf mimics with Pizzaz um so again you guys might see these at the rain Garden we don't see them at the Titusville Garden as much because it's just an open Sunny area um one butterfly that you do see a lot in both places and we'll see we're about to get to is the gulf frary so we'll talk about that guy a little bit but our next group is the heliconian and frares um all these butterflies are in the same family because they all use the same host plant which is Passion vines or passion flowers um they're all brush foots they're all medium to large in size but all of the heliconian and feries have elongated for wings so long front Wings compared to their hind wings so the gulf ferary is super super super super common um some people will mistake them for monarchs just because they're both orange and mediumsized but these guys are everywhere we hopefully will see some today if we go outside um we see them at the Titusville Garden all the time um the top is just sort of brown and orange mostly orange and then the underside you get those white spots as well um I've heard them described as a Thanksgiving spread on top just because they're so kind of brown orange colors and then um like a disco ball or dress like Lady Gaga underneath because of the white shiny spots I think that's an exaggeration they just look orange to me um but that is a butterfly to look out for that we will probably see the variegated frary um is smaller much smaller we don't see these as often and they actually kind of look like a different group of butterflies we'll get to in a little bit called crescents um and again this is not one we see often usually when are talking about Frid Aries they're talking about the gulf frider then we have julias which have again those really long four wings they're mostly orange some of them have black markings on them and then the zebra long Wing are state butterfly so we may see these um they are the butterfly of the State of Florida um a lot of times they do really like shady area so you'll see them in nature preserves and things like that uh but definitely a butterfly to look out for and a good one to get down to species the zebra long Wing it's a fun one um so if you all H good question I don't know if I've really noticed it when I've been out looking at them either so um in this picture you can see it really clearly but again with the colors and the different butterflies some individuals are brighter than others depending on the time of year and things like that but um thankfully with long four wings and then the yellowish White Stripes They're pretty easy to identify so they're a fun one to see any other questions okay let's go ahead and take a break for a couple minutes and use the bathroom and get up and stretch our legs and then we'll keep going e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e Al righty how's everybody's break hopefully long enough because we got to crank through some more how many groups do we have left left one two three four five six okay we're yeah we're like halfway there um and we have some fun groups coming up next so um anybody have any questions before we start okay so we are in the middle of our brushfoot butterflies um and this next group are our CR so these guys are quite small um and I think this is a group where they all look very very similar um so again we're doing morog groups so you just have to write Crescent I can barely tell them apart and I've been trying to do this for a couple years now you you have to have a photo for these guys really um or a guide book handy um but our cescs are an inch to an inch and three4 um and again like I said they all look the same so we have the Cuban Crescent which kind of has you can see on the outline of the wing kind of these like indentations then we have the F Crescent which has supposedly the identifying marker is that white band on the fourwing and the Pearl Crescent which the identifier for this butterfly is that white marking on the hindwing that's circled in yellow so like I said these three butterflies all kind of look the same they're all small in size um I've seen these butterflies rest with their wings open quite a bit it's always fun when you see one and of course like I said you only have to write Crescent so they'll have nailed it next Group which is another fun one are Buckey so Buckeyes have eye spots um we have the mangrove Buckeye and the common buckeye um we'll see mang Buckeyes quite a bit along the Indian River Lagoon um unfortunately we don't see them too much in our Titus cille garden and I'm not sure how much we'll see them here because you do see them um along Lagoon Shoreline sort of specifically I want to say they use black mangroves as their host plant uh Mangrove Buckeyes so the common buckeye has a little bit more color in their eye spots their larger eye spot um you can see that kind of purpley color um whereas The Mangrove Buckeye unfortunately isn't doesn't have as much pizaz even though I love them they're just not quite as colorful as the common Buckey are but those are our two Buckeye species that's easy um then we move into our Emperors so these guys are just sort of orange spotted mediumsized butterflies their host plants are hackberry trees so we don't see them as much I wouldn't say um and Emperors can be attracted to sweat so they'll land on people just to get a little sweat every once in a while haven't had it happen to me unfortunately but supposedly it happens to other people um the Hackberry Emperor has these sort of blue iridescent spots on the ventral side meanwhile the tny emperor has the spots aren't as round um they're quite smaller and then you can see on the female they are barely existent so we'll go back this is the Hackberry Emperor again with those distinct kind of circles um and then the tonny emperor has you can see like little glimmers of the blue and kind of little dark spots but not as pronounced and the coloring is a little different between the two um kind of a light brown on top for the Hackberry Emperor versus kind of a bradish orange y Brown um but again we just put Emperor and we call it a day and we probably don't see those butterflies too much next is a group called saders um these butterflies usually have swollen veins in their wings so you can kind of see the outline of these vein like structures um and they often have eye spots as well they're small to medium butterflies we don't see them very much in the Titusville Garden I guess we'll see if we see them in the rain Garden but these are very much kind of like Woodland species I would say um they like wooded areas so we have the southern pearly ey this is the biggest out of all the saders um again just kind of brown you can see that um those veins kind of in the fourwing that we were talking about just sort of the outline of what looks like vein type structures and ey spots on the bottom they have the Carolina Sader again brown with ey spots the Georgia Sader I guess you could consider these ey spots they're a little oblong but again brown butterfly medium siiz with some spots underneath the little wood Sader brown with ey spots um this is a butterfly that was found at that acronym is Meritt Island National Wildlife Refuge so you all are familiar with that up here um it's not very common within Florida but they have during their monitoring written that they've seen it so we added it to our guide just in case but of course to the textbooks it's not really supposed to come all the way down here um also we have the Appalachian Brown same thing like not super common in this region but they've recorded it at merid Island Wildlife Refuge so we put it in our guide book just to make sure we have our bases covered go ahead it depends on the species so the little wood Sader you can see them from the top and the bottom but most of them it's just on the bottom you can see some of these butterflies haven't been photographed As Much from the top um like this Georgia seder you see the image of it flying was like the only image I could get of its uh dorsal Wing view um but for most of them and I would say a lot of the Butterflies eye spots are usually on the ventral side so that when they close their wings that's what shows um because again usually with ey spots if we go back to the um like Buckey they're on towards the outside of the wings um so that Predators again are going to nibble on those more interesting parts of the butterfly to save their body which is really the most essential part for them to survive so usually eye spots are on the bottom side or the ventral side but not always it depends on the species so next are our most charismatic butterflies are royalty so this includes our Monarch which is probably the most famous butterfly in North America which we'll talk about a little bit um but monarchs is not where this family ends we also have queens and Viceroy um so they're all orange is sh Queens get a little bit more red um and they all use the hostplant milkweed or milkweed is a group of plants really besides the Viceroy which is kind of a Monarch Faker it's not actually related to the other two so the Monarch and the queen are actually the same genus so really closely related just a different species whereas the Viceroy is just a completely different I believe it's a brushfoot butterfly and these butterflies are quite large royalty are the type of butterflies that like to fly high in the air and just like slowly flip by um they don't really kind of a lot of those smaller butterflies like sulfur and blues sort of just flitter along the ground monarchs are and royalties are high in the sky sort of floating by and you'll see them um usually just as a quick little Zoom by you as they continue on their way to find some more milked um so we will dive into these guys really quick they're larger butterflies so they're about 3 to 4.8 in can grab these for you all so monarchs so we'll talk about monarchs really quick because like we said they're I feel confident in saying that they're North America's most iconic butterfly everybody knows what a monarch is um so monarchs do migrate in North America um they don't love the cold butterflies don't love the cold in general and monarchs live a long time so they will migr down um you can see the migration patterns on this map so some of them go down I would say majority of them I guess from the west and Central us go down into Mexico to overwinter but we do have some you can see that follow that red line down into Florida to overwinter so Florida is where things get messy per usual with a lot of species so we have a migrating population that comes into Florida to over winter and then um migrates back North but we also have a non-migratory sort of permanent population in South Florida so it's kind of hard to see on the graphic but you see South Florida is in purple then there's a gray area where we are and then there's the orange area for the migrating monarchs so that gray area I guess we're kind of in the purple actually because the purple goes up along the coast um so we in Florida we have a mix of Resident and migrating monarchs um usually they migrate in one group so it's the same butterfly let's say that leaves the Midwest and then goes down into Mexico but then it takes multiple generations for them to make their way back up um and because they're flying such long distances monarchs need nectar plants to drink nectar from for that whole distance across the these multiple countries so that means we need to have native plants to provide nectar in the US as well as Mexico so there has to be this sort of um both countries working together to protect one species which makes it an interesting conservation um problem to address and it's going to take working together to provide enough nectar plants and host plants for monarchs so a lot of our Monarch population has been lost since the 1990s over 80 % so that's a pretty big loss um and again like with a lot of butterflies a lot of that can be attributed to habitat loss so areas that were natural areas that used to have a lot of milkweed either being developed for residential purposes or agriculture or Urban purposes and then we've taken away that host plant and then also just having less flowering plants in our Landscaping so leaning more towards sod and things like that that don't provide nectar and having these butterflies have to pass through let's say they have to go through a whole town full of buildings and cement and sod and then pass over an agricultural area that's all one crop that doesn't necessarily flower let's say it's corn or something like that um so they're losing a lot of their nectar plants and host plants one thing to keep in mind when you are trying to provide habitat for monarchs in Florida is the difference between native milkweeds and tropical milkweeds so you want to avoid planning the tropical milked species in in Florida because it's not a native plant and it can actually encourage monarchs to stay in Florida when they are part of that population that is supposed to leave and um since that um tropical milked doesn't die back like our native milked does in the winter it can sort of help promote the spread of a parasite that actually is um diminishing our Monarch populations so you need to be really careful which with which milke weeds you buy and milked can be hard to find if you're finding it at Home Depot it's not the native milked don't buy that one if it's at a big store like that they usually don't have the natives you could have to go to local nurseries and specifically make sure that it's one of the Native species go ahead yeah and it depends on who you talk to what recommendations you give um cuz I want to say yeah like I think it's UF that recommends that cutting it back um okay yeah that would be a great thing to attend because you know science is always changing and we always want to have the best information based on new evidence so um I would if you do have milked in your yard I would definitely pay attention to what the different organizations are saying I know um Florida Native Plant Society just released a statement stating that they discourage the use of tropical milk weed at all um I have heard I believe it's out of UF that they have the recommendation for cutting it back in the winter so that butterflies can't use it then and it's kind of D we're making it go dormant and then there's actually been other entomologists saying not to plant milk weed at all in Florida just because of the confusion between the two and that our monarchs are doing pretty well in Florida versus the rest of the country that migrating population out west is not doing too well but we we see them quite often right I see monarchs right now especially fluttering around quite a bit so milkweed is a pretty hot topic right now um so I'll be paying attention to whatever comes out next from the different entities and seeing um what the best course of action is our garden in Titusville actually doesn't have any milked because I tried we just couldn't keep it alive so we just don't have any milked in our garden um but it is in general for uh management of monarchs in the United States and into Mexico having enough native milked is really important of course here in Florida where we have a really high number of invasive and exotic species and such that temperature different things get messy in our state which is what makes it fun to be an ecologist in Florida because there's always a new interesting challenge um so we'll stay tuned to see what happens with the milked but for identification purposes monarchs are pretty easy to identify we know them very well we've been probably looking at images of monarchs since we were children so one thing to keep in mind is monarchs are always going to have that sort of stained glass pattern on their ventral hindwing so and forewing so from top and bottom that hindwing is going to have that sort of stained glass nothing is even so if you look at that back wi all those sizes are different so keep that in mind as we look at our Monarch fakey in a couple of slides um this is the queen she's a little bit smaller and a little bit darker in the top view that dorsal view looks different than a monarch it's reddish with little white spots but from the ventral view or underneath they look quite similar um so you might have to see the queen from both angles to figure out what she is um and usually that darker red color and a little bit smaller then we have the Viceroy so this again is our Monarch fakey so originally it was thought that this was a butterfly that was mimicking monarchs because monarchs are similar to that swallow chill species we talked about earlier that are not very tasty and their host plant when their caterpillar's milkweed does have a toxic substance that they can handle but then when an animal tries to eat them it either doesn't tastes very good or it actually causes damage to that animal because um it is poisonous so the original thought was that vicy were just little fakies trying to pretend they're poisonous when they're not um newer science found that they actually are poisonous themselves because their host plant actually does the same thing for them so it turns out they're what we call a malarian mimic where things two species that are both poisonous or both similar end up looking the same so it wasn't a copycat situation it was more of a growing up together situation I guess where they both ended up they're doing the same thing so they ended up kind of looking the same um but the main difference you the way you can tell a Viceroy from a monarch is that solid bar through the hindwing so if we go back to the pictures of the Monarch again we have that stained glass look but with viceo we have that one solid bar that cuts through you will never see that on a monarch so that's the main difference again we're using morphog groups so if you see a monarch looking butterfly we're going to call it royalty and stop there I would recommend only getting down to Monarch versus vicroy if they land and you're really able to see that bar if they're flying by we're just going to have to write royalty because again we want to be really certain rather than um we'd rather be General and be 100% sure than get specific and be 50/50 because that doesn't help us um with our analysis so now to the really really fun part Skippers the rest of the butterflies in your packet are all Skippers um we do have different Morpho groups which helps and then we have our giant group of grass Skippers which is like 30 butterflies that I'm just going to click through the pictures of because we can't tell them apart um but Skippers are a really big family Skippers are kind of where the butterfly moth line gets blurry so we talked about butterflies being daytime moths essentially so Skippers do like the daytime they're out and about um but they kind of look like moths um they're usually darker in color a little bit more drab I guess which is mean but that's the best way to describe them um and their moths are usually fuzzy and their bodies are stockier these butterflies are that way so they're a little bit heftier in their bodies they have bigger eyes they're really cute um but this is these are the types of butterflies that people usually get confused with moths and again butterflies are moths um but we have to have our separation for our monitoring so these guys are small they're usually about an inch or yeah I guess about an inch in size to three inches um and we'll hit our major groups and then like I said we'll go into our grass Skippers so our first Maj major group is spreadwing Skippers these butterflies don't necessarily look the same but they all rest with their wings open which is supposed to be unusual for butterflies um but when they're resting on Plants they'll have their wings spread open and these guys actually instead of having Chrysalis they have Leaf nests which are more like cocoons um and our spread Wing Skippers include the subcategories of longtail Dusky wing and cloudy Wing Skippers so Mangrove Skippers we see these guys out on the Lagoon and out on the spoil Islands I'm always really excited um if you're ever at a nature preserve kind of walking along shorelines or through mangroves you might see Mangrove Skippers because they use red mangroves as their host plants um they're a black butterfly you'll always see them resting with their wings open and they can be kind of iridescent colored then we have the silver spotted Skipper same thing rest with their wings open you can see how fuzzy this guy is in his body again that's more of a moth type characteristic then we have the Hayer scallop Wing again it's a spread Wing Skipper resting with his wings open the common checkered Skipper um I guess you could get this confused with one of our white butterflies they're going to be resting with their wings open whereas the Great Southern whites and the other white butterflies will either be like flapping their wings usually or have them closed when they land these guys were going to land with their wings open um and they have a really intense checkered pattern most of our whites don't have this much black on their wings and again their their bodies are stouter they have these big cute eyes on the sides of their head the other butterflies eyes aren't usually that big so those are our spreadwing Skippers now these are our spreadwing long tail Skippers we only have two of these um and again they rest with their wings open but they have these really long tails and there's only two there's one that has this pretty blue color and then one that's just Brown so the longtailed skipper gets this pretty blue iridescent color so there's a view with it with its wings open and its wings closed and you can see you'll see them when they land on Plants the that tail is pretty easy to see it looks kind of odd attached to the butterfly because it's so long and that's the really pretty one nice and blue and then we get the dantis longtailed skipper or um drab longtail Skipper D for dantis d for drab so they're both just brown but again have that long tail now we're going to get into the Cloudy Wing Skippers which I think these are very easy to confuse species-wise so again cloudy Wing is as low as we need to go so they're brown with white markings and they're pretty small and again they have their wings open when they West so this is a southern cloudy Wing that you're supposed to be able to tell what it is by that little white bar and then the northern cloudy Wing which doesn't have that little white bar but has white spots and then the confused cloudy Wing because we can't tell if it's the Northern or the southern cloudy Wing because it has more white spots than white bars so again we're confused yeah the butterfli is not confused we're confused um so again northern southern confused we're all just going to call them cloudy wings and call it a day now we're going to get into the Dusky Wing Skippers which same thing just call it a Dusky wing and call it a day because they all look the same to me um again small size Brown it can be hard to tell a Dusky Wing from a cloudy Wing so you can just put spread wi Skipper if you want to put that it was brown that's great but yeah you can just put spread Wing Skipper because you saw it resting with its wings open it was brown and you couldn't tell if it was a Dusky Wing or a cloudy Wing cuz again these all kind of look similar they're all just brown with a spread Wing um so there's our sleepy Dusky Wing our horse's Dusky wing and then our zeruko Dusky Wing so again they have their wing spread these guys don't have as bright of patches as the confused and Southern cloudy wings so our cloudy Wing butterflies are more brown with these distinct White markings whereas the Dusky wings are brown with kind of faded brown markings so not as distinct but again if it's brown and it has its wings open and it's about an inch to two inches long just call it a spread wi Skipper and call it a day but there are our dusu wings again okay here comes the fun part these are our grass Skippers so you can tell if you see a grass Skipper you'll be able to tell that you'll be able to check that one off the list they sit in this really weird position that people call the Jet Plane position so you can see it in the three photos on the slide they put their oh let's see if I can remember the orientation I think it's their hindwing below and then their fourwing on top so they look like a little jet again I didn't I didn't come up with that that was what was said in the ID books but I can see it this time so they're usually Brown orange or yellow um and again you'll see them if they're sitting you'll usually see them in that weird position no other butterfly is going to sit like that except for grass Skippers and lucky us in Florida we have about 30 species of these guys and they're all brown orange or yellow and they all sit the same way they're all very cute but I can't tell them apart so for monitoring we're just going to call them grass Skippers and put them all together and that's good enough for us because then we know kind of what types of butterflies we're getting in these Gardens and how many we're really just trying to figure out relative abundance and relative diversity so what kinds of butterflies are we getting are we getting a lot of different kinds a lot of different groups and how many are we getting compared to um traditional lawn spaces or what the site was like before so again we don't need to get anything down to species we just need to get things to number one is it a butterfly and then number two can you tell maybe what group The Butterfly belongs to so really quick we're going to run through our 30 grass Skipper species you ready all right swarthy Skipper three spotted Skipper has more than three spots so don't let it fool you clouded Skipper Southern Skipper Ling this one's cute at least it's yellow it's not just Brown lease Skipper fiery Skipper this one's cool um because they say it looks like Flames I guess mesky Skipper T Edge Skipper the whirlabout Southern broken Dash Northern broken Dash seum Skipper arogo Skipper Delaware Skipper now we're getting into state names B Skipper I haven't done this PowerPoint in a while so if I forget how to pronounce something sorry Aaron Skipper Palmetto Skipper so um we do have a lot of Sal paletto in Florida so this Skipper uses Sal paletto as a host plant so that's really good to know Sal paletto is is an amazing native plant I think it's the plant that's on the uh Florida native plant license plate um because it's such a remarkable species in the State of Florida and so many different animals use it everything from black bears and Panthers use saw palmet to the palet skipper so a really wide variety of Life relies on Sal paletto so if you can put some in your yard maybe you would enjoy that it grows really slow though just a heads up so don't expect it to grow much in that time and you might get some petto Skippers but anyways continuing on we have the plaa skipper Berry Skipper dun Skipper monk Skipper we're still going more brown butterflies in that jetwing position dusted Skipper eala Skipper twin spot Skipper Brazilian Skipper I think we're getting to the end salt marsh Skipper obscure Skipper not like the rest of these are also obscure a cola Skipper Baracoa Skipper oh there's still more I thought we were getting to the end zabulon Skipper oh that was it okay so as you can see if I flip through it really fast I think most of these butterflies look pretty similar so again you're probably going to see them like like I said we have around 30 species they're really cool they sit in that really unique way so I have full confidence that you guys can identify them to Grass Skipper so again grass Skipper sits in that jet position we can all get them to Grass Skipper but I do not expect anyone including myself to go past there without taking photos and diving into a book go ahead they do um let me go oh going the wrong way yeah it depends some of them I believe do use grass species as hosts um so maybe that's where the name came from let me check in here really quick okay so most of them are supposed to use grasses or sges as host plants but like everything in nature not all of them do and yeah I'm sure you saw some of them on different plants as well um but since they all look similar and act similar and they must be related taxonomically they all ended up in that grass Skipper category so last group of butterflies right yeah last group of butterflies we're almost done is our giant Skippers and there's only two so that was pretty much it we're in the home stretch now um giant Skippers are just grass Skippers but way bigger and chunkier so they're just giant grass Skippers pretty much uh like I said there's only two of them um and we're we really only usually see one if at all um this is the more common the yucka giant Skipper um again these are two butterflies that are going to be difficult to tell apart so if you see a gigantic grass Skipper then you know it's a giant Skipper and um you completed your monitoring you're good to go so we have the yucka giant Skipper and then we have this guy it's our other species we only have two again just write giant Skipper and call call it a butterfly you ided it correctly you're done again if you you this these butterflies are quite larger so these are two to three inches whereas grass Skippers are usually like around an inch in size so you would be able to tell the difference also you can see their bodies are really chunky um grass Skippers are too but these guys just look huge in comparison to those other grass Skippers an in yeah so this is like our usual grass Skipper would be like an inch and then the giant Skippers would be like 2 to three in so it's a pretty substantial difference and you can see in the photos they just look chunky very round for a butterfly very moth looking so that's it you guys learned every butterfly in the region congratulations that was a lot there's a lot of butterflies globally and in the State of Florida but I don't know we probably went through like aund and something I don't even know I haven't even counted all of them I don't think um but here are the groups that we need to remember we have swallow Tails which are large colorful had those Tails whites again white butterflies sulfur are yellow hair streaks have those thin Tails except for the itala which you if you see an itala you could probably just write that down because like we remember they're black with that orange then we have Blues which are tiny uh metal marks which we don't see often there's only the one of them Leaf mimics look like leaves ladies and Admirals are Leaf mimics with a little bit of flare then we have the long long-winged heliconian and feries this photo right here is a golf frary which we see a lot so I'm sure you guys will become familiar with him crescents are small Buckeyes have those ey spots Emperors are just orange butterflies with ey spots uh when you know them when you see them you'll know them uh royalties are our monarchs and friends we have then lots of Skippers we have our spreadwing Skippers which we have the subcategories longtail cloudy wing and Dusky Wing then we have our grass Skippers that we just went over the little jet plane butterflies and then our giant Skippers which are like our jumbo Jets I guess um does anybody have any questions about the Morpho groups or any questions about butterflies in general I can try to answer any of those questions the best that I can go ahead have a question Mo mhm is it a mo that out atach your building yeah so maybe you're talking about the you're talking about a moth that comes out at night and attaches cocoons to the side of the buildings it's probably um bag worm moths yeah they it almost looks like their little cocon is made out of teeny tiny little sticks yeah so that's I'm pretty sure bag worm moths does that some rate to you guys okay um I don't know if it will keep them away I usually kind of like to see them at my house I do have a lot of them yeah I know I don't I don't know what the moth looks like I've only seen the Cocoon as well yeah but yeah that would be a moth um speaking of moths actually that's our next slide so moths usually fly at Night the things that we kind of put on moths and Associate them with is darker color a little bit more dull only fly at night they usually rest with their wings folded like the two brown moths on this slide and that tent position um but that's not always true as you can see there's some bright colorful ones like that yellow moth on there um also that white one that is on there as well sometimes they will fly during the day usually if you're doing a survey and you're walking through vegetation you'll see moths kind of come off the vegetation when you get close to it or touch it and then kind of Dive Right Back back into the shade so that's kind of a moth characteristic and they usually have more feathery antenna whereas butterflies always have the clubs on the end um moths and butterflies can be kind of hard to tell apart because like I said they're all in the same I think earlier I said same family they're all in the same order um they're all pretty closely related and butterflies are really just a group of day flying moths um moths are very very important and I think I mentioned earlier for every one species of butterfly globally there's usually 10 species of moths so they do a lot of pollination at night um one thing to keep in mind about moths and butterflies in general they're actually not the best pollinators that's part of their job but especially butterflies since they have long legs and long proboscis which are their tongues that they sort of unroll and shoot out to go and get nectar they kind of stay away from the pollen they're like up on top of the flower perched and drinking nectar from whereas we're going to get into bees later bees are the ultimate pollinators globally cuz they're rolling all around in that pollen and crawling into flowers and getting covered in it um butterflies and moths aren't necessarily the best pollinators they're important they're just not as they don't get themselves as covered in pollen as bees do but they're also really important indicators of environmental health so if we're having a lot of habitat loss a lot of pesticide use um and kind of unhealthy environmental parameters you'll see a drop in butterfly and moths and if we're doing more to promote a healthier environment you usually see an uptick in butterflies and moths so they're a good indicator of what's going on habitat wise because we talked about host plants and nectar plants um a good indicator of if we have Rich plant biodiversity in the area and also we all love butterflies they're fun to see Float by um they can remind us of loved ones or experiences so they're fun for us to monitor for environmental purposes but also just for our own satisfaction was there a question I'm not I'm going to be truthful I'm really not good with my moths because I have all these butterflies in my head I have no more room for any other lepidoptera um but maybe I would have to Google that one yeah I'm not sure off the top of my head but I believe you because yeah they the we put things in categories but they don't always follow all the rules yeah um so now we're going to do a quiz you guys feel ready feel free to use your guide open yes it's open book everything is open book when it comes to me um and you guys can just go ahead and Shout out the answer we'll make we'll make it fun so oh is it oh no I guess the animations didn't work oh okay here we go so this we'll use this as an example of what's going to happen the animations worked on the next one so we'll go through it the first question is is it a butterfly yes um and then what Morpho group we think it's in so this would be a grass Skipper it's not exactly in that jet plane position but close enough and then species which I'm again I'm not expecting anyone to know it's Southern skipperling and remember you don't need to know species we just need to know number one is it a butterfly yes or no that's the first question if you get that one right you're already doing really well and the second question is do we know what group it belongs to those are the two most important things to ask yourself and that's what you'll ask yourself when you're out in the field okay so let me see okay is it a butterfly yes did that come up or no okay there we go um oh I just put this one straight to species do you guys remember which butterfly this is okay so it's a golf frary so medium orange size but what medium siiz orange butterfly um super super common you will learn this butterfly probably by the end of this week if you see it even just a couple times super common you'll see it everywhere so that's our golf rdary see if the next one works okay and then yeah our reminder not every orange butterfly is a monarch because we have a lot of golf feries and a lot of times people will mistake them for monarchs and if you see an orange butterfly fly by and you have no idea if it was a frary or a monarch you just write unknown butterfly and that's perfect because then we're still getting to know how many butterflies we're seeing in the area if you do a survey and you have no idea what any of them are just write unknown butterfly and tally them up because at least then we know how many butterflies you all saw in that seven minute or 10 minute span that you were out there and then we can compare sites and say when when you plant plants look how many butterflies you get is kind of the idea and then getting down to the groups is kind of bonus content for us to use like we planted these plants and these were the types of butterflies we got but really we're mostly interested in okay we're putting in these amazing Gardens who's coming to use them pollinator wise was there a question I was thinking one way yeah because the gulf Frid Aries don't yeah the black lining is definitely an indicator of a monarch versus this guy I would say okay next one is it a butterfly yeah so this is a butterfly it's really tiny but still a butterfly and it's these guys usually fly low to the ground too so they can be confused with moths but it is a butterfly can anybody remember what morphog group this is blue yes so this is a a little blue butterfly um and then can anybody guess what species it is it looks like it has one big spot on the hindwing h so it can be hard or did I write the wrong one let me look at the guide really quick again if you get it to Blue that's the most important um I took these from our ey naturalist page so the species that's on the slide should be correct unless I typed it wrong can double check real quick yeah so I can see why we thought it was the Casas blue because it kind of looks gray and whitish um the cassus blue usually has two spots and then the serranus blue has one I purposefully chose a picture that showed the butterfly kind of farther away because in the field it's not going to be holding still right in front of your eyes it is going to be farther away so again we're just going to write blue and that's going to be enough because we don't need to know the species we just need to know the group okay so this next one is it a butterfly no it's not a butterfly um it is actually a coffee loving pyus moth I think I mped that um but yes you guys are right that one's a moth because it has that those tented Wings even though it's out in the sun still a moth okay so now we have this guy is this a butterfly yes and this is in which Morpho group so it's sitting on this will give you a size reference too this is g to drip water over this is the plant that it's on so that's how big that flower is it looks huge in the picture but it's really quite small in real life so it's smaller um it's sitting with its wings spread so it is it is a spread Wing Skipper so it's um sitting on the plant with its wings spread and then yeah I think I heard what species it is so if you go to spread wi Skipper it is well okay so on here I put white checkered Skipper white Checker Skipper and common checkered Skipper is like the same butterfly I think they might actually be different butterflies but you cannot tell them apart without a microscope it's not possible for anyone to tell them apart unless you take them back to lab and use a microscope so yeah our either common checkered or white checkered Skipper perfect and again we don't need to know species that one if you see it you will probably you know with a little bit of practice be able to get that one down to species okay so next one this one's a little bit trickier is it a butterfly yes it is a butterfly what group do we think this butterfly belongs to it's smaller I think it's like an inch or two in size eyes so it is a crescent what about again especially with cresant I don't expect you to know species but I think you have a one and three shot of just yelling out the right one so what do you think the species is for this guy all right let's see Pearl Crescent Great guesses and again remember we do not need to get to spe Crescent was perfect and even just knowing it was a butterfly is perfect okay now this guy is this a butterfly yes and what group do we think this butterfly belongs to swall swallow tail perfect that was a great unanimous swallow tail loving it and then species beautiful Eastern black swallow tail beautiful I will admit not the best with my swallow Tails because I usually just since I'm used to doing the monitoring I just write swallow tail and a little tally and don't go any further than that so you guys are doing better than me and then again remember we don't need to get to species but with swallow taals it sounds like you guys might be able to pretty soon or already all right next one is it a butterfly yes and this is actually a butterfly that we just took a picture of at our um annual little volunteer get together so that might give Dennis and Rhonda a hint um okay what's the morphog group for this little yellow butterfly sulfur okay so and then two we can put it as a large sulfur or a small sulfur to give me more information so which one um let's see the leaf is probably like as big as the leaf on here so large sulfur or small sulfur small perfect the large sulfur are like three in or two or 3 in so yeah this would be a small sulfur and then anybody have a guess as to which species beautiful little yellow awesome and then yep we don't need species but it's fun to try while we're practicing not when you're writing down data don't guess when you're writing down data um okay is it a butterfly yes what morphog group would this be royalty and which species is this I'm like oh goodness I hope I wrote the right species yep Viceroy our Monarch trickster our fakey and um again for those two if you see a royalty family butterfly flying and you don't know if it's a monarch or a vooy we're just going to write royalty they really need to be landed for you to see that solid stripe okay what about this one is this a butterfly awesome yes morphog group hair streak has those little hair tals okay any guess it's species I actually don't [Music] remember this so let me see if I can guess all right we'll go with gray it's hard because you have the white M hair streak and then you're looking at the other ones and I see multiple M's so all right let's see it is a gray hair streak great job but we don't need to know that we just need to know if it's a butterfly or not it's more just for fun um it depends so if you are 100% sure that you know what it is and there are some like Gulf feries write the species for that one um and there's a couple others like the white peacock you can write the species for that one um when it get yeah mhm um and I mean on every data sheet there's going to be a notes section so you can even write on there um like if you are a new volunteer but you are really good with butterflies um and you write on there down to species you can always write in the notes like I'm 100% sure that that's what I saw just so because again for us doing data entry we're just getting the data sheets from you all we're not there in person um but our general rule is only to rate the species if you're completely confident you would bet your life on that butterfly identification otherwise just have it as the Morpho group because it's better we just want accuracy um and we're okay with a general result as long as it's accurate um so it kind of depends too like how long we you'll write your names on the data sheets and usually well hopefully it'll be like veteran folks with new folks and you know we'll kind of sometimes we'll be out with you um so if you can get it to species go for it but definitely not the priority I guess I would say um but so thank you all to the folks who helped me with this or who put out guides that I um took information from because like I said before I'm more of an esterine ecologist not an entomologist um so I really use these resources from other folks and also thank you to all the incredible photographers I think this picture is the only picture in this PowerPoint presentation that is mine the rest of them came from other folks um a lot of them came from Dennis here actually in the front row um so thank you to all the photographers that make this training possible because like I said I think this is literally the only picture in here I think actually maybe in the second slide there's one picture of a butterfly that's mine but besides that we really rely on these photographers to take some great photographs for us and for all of these entomologists who have come up with these guides and published all this information because that's really where I got all of this from is entomologist mostly UF or USDA um and thank you all for dealing with me yapping on and on for like two hours we're going to take lunch now so thank you all so much for your patience thank you Emily don't worry you're going to hear back from her about bees after so um but yeah well let's take a 30 minute break for lunch um so be back here at like 1:5 five um before you leave um if you can um just put your email on the signin sheet for when you signed in in the hallway um that's how we'll communicate with you as we ramp up the volunteer monitoring and get schedules scheduled and everything like that um so please do that as you're walking out the door but yeah let's be back at 10:5 for talking about bees e e e e e e e e e awesome can you can everybody hear me okay perfect okay so welcome back everyone um who's ready for bees it's going to get crazy um before we get too crazy most important thing today um today is actually Lexi's birthday there in the back behind the glass so everybody wave and wish Lexi a happy birthday and thank you for being here and listening to this all day on your birthday that's dedication to the work um so we'll go ahead and spend probably the next hour and a half total talking about bees so if you guys thought butterflies were crazy bees are even crazier I would uh yeah probably like double the amount of species um for our region so we'll do the same thing or we can take a break like halfway through um and does everybody have their uh morpo guide morphog group guide um because that'll be really helpful to follow along especially our flowchart um so I'll walk you all through it but I guess we'll go ahead and just get started with some basic information about bees uh so our agenda for like I said about the next hour and a half um we be briefly I'll probably do the same thing I did with butterflies where um I don't really dive too far into it um but you all can ask questions as we go because not a lot of not a lot of people know about our native bees compared to honeybees um don't ask me too much about honeybees because I'm the opposite I don't know too much about honeybees compared to Native bees but we'll do the same thing we'll talk about B Basics really quick dive into B for most of the time and then do another little quiz at the end and you guys did so good with butterflies I'm sure bees were going to do amazing um so bees in Florida specifically we have around 3155 native bee species in the State of Florida that number fluctuates as we find new species Maybe unfortunately is we lose some species but even cooler than that is we have around 29 some people say 30 species of endemic bees so we talked about that term earlier if something is endemic it means it's only found in one place in the entire world so we have 29 or 30 species of bees that are only found in Florida and nowhere else they're not found in Georgia they're not found in the rest of the Caribbean only Florida um there's around 4,000 species of bees in the US and 20,000 globally and bees around the world are known as the most important and most effective pollinators in most ecosystems um honey bees are a species of bee that we all know a lot about a lot of us eat honey bee honey uh sometimes Honey Combs we use bees for agriculture in the United States but they're actually not native to North America honeybees came over with European settlers from Europe uh to produce honey and to help with agriculture but there were no honeybees in North America before white European settlers came from across the Atlantic um but we do have a lot of native bees like we said around 315 species but our native bees act very differently than honey bees if you think about bees in general honey bees are actually kind of the odd ones or the weird ones with that Colony structure um that's not really really usual of native Bees honey bees are a interesting and unique species or group of bees um and our native bees in Florida are mostly solitary nesters and most of them actually Nest underground in small holes our native bees are better adapted than honey bees to forage in Florida um and in our native habitats and with our native plants and they're more diverse definitely because like I said we have uh quite a few species a lot of different colors sizes some bees that don't even look like bees at all so we'll go through all of them um but unfortunately nearly one in four native B species in the US is at risk of decline um there was a study done in the US uh that looked at all the B species that we have and looked at all the information that we have and found that they could really only do population assessments for half of all of the species because it just wasn't enough data um because native species aren't studied as much and then out of that half they found that about half of those species were in Decline so things aren't looking super great for our native bees again as we take away important native plants um use of pesticides also um harms native bees climate change is also a big thing for Native bees with t timing of flowers blooming and then the emergence of bees in Florida where it's warm year round of course like we were talking about with butterflies things get kind of weird because a lot of the information for Native bees is actually kind of um written for the United States as a whole and most everybody else in the US has more of a winter than we do so bees will over winter whereas in Florida we can kind of get through more life cycles more quickly because our ground doesn't freeze um in the southern half of our state um does does anybody have any questions about any of that b Basics yeah I think it depends on how far south you are because too with Florida being a gradient we can't even say like when you live in Florida do this because things are so different in Miami than here um one thing to keep in mind is that for leaf cutter bees specifically they'll use that plant material to nest in like the spring and summer as well um so good to kind of keep some of those dead branches and things I would say in Florida all the time um trying to think m yeah yeah and it doesn't need to be anything crazy I know for us at our Titusville site I kind of go a little crazy with it I would say our Titusville Garden is an extreme example of wildlife friendly Landscaping but it doesn't need to be that crazy you can just leave like a cute bundle and make it look nice if you want in your yard it doesn't have to just be dead branches everywhere for the native bees but yeah our based on textbooks like I said Florida gets a little weird um but we'll talk about that a little bit as we go through cuz all these different bees we'll talk about have different sort of life cycles um so we'll talk a little bit about each group as we go through any other questions okay so now we'll hop into we kind of have to do a little bit of basic anatomy in order to go through the rest of the PowerPoint so these belong to the order hopter um which is bees wasps hornets sawflies and ants so they're all in the same order um bees were referred to by someone as cotton candy with wings so out of that group they're the fuzziest probably the cutest um they have three main body parts their head their thorax and their abdomen so the thorax is sort of that middle part of their body um and sometimes throughout the PowerPoint you will refer to their abdomen actually as their butt just cuz it's easier to remember sometimes than abdomen um but yeah head thorax and then abdomen on the bottom females are the bees that actually collect and carry pollen male bees just end up being covered in pollen from going and foraging plants so they're going to be using nectar from Plants as food um females will actually purposely collect pollen to bring to their young whereas males just kind of end up getting covered in pollen because they're going in after nectar and they have to climb through flowers to get to that nectar um for our native bees females usually collect that pollen and they'll make what's called a pollen Loaf and then they'll leave that loaf of pollen in the little Nest cells for their young to emerge and eat so they life cycle is you can kind of think of it's similar to a butterfly so there's like the egg time period then um they hatch and will eat the uh the pollen Loaf and then they'll pupate like butterflies and kind of emerge as an adult bee but it's all happening either underground in a log or in a plant stem not in these fancy crysalis that are hanging from flowers but usually tucked in somewhere that we can't see um in depending on the size of the bee that affects how far they can travel to find food so honey bees are actually pretty good at flying to find food I think they can do a couple miles on a good day uh Bumblebee bees can fly a mile leaf cutter bees can fly about, 1500 feet and then our sweat bees are known to fly around 500 feet to find food so if you have native plants in your yard in a place for bees to Nest bees can spend their entire life cycle just within your lawn or within your yard um or within our rain Garden potentially if we have some native bees using it they can spend their whole life just in the rain garden and that's enough for them oh yeah and then on here it says honey bees can fly up to 6 miles so a little bit more than a couple but um really really important pollinators in the system um pollinators and flowering plants evolved together so we wouldn't have our pretty flowers without our bees and we wouldn't have our bees without our pretty flowers so um that is sort of really really basic information on bees does anybody have any questions okay awesome so we'll just go ahead and hop into ID and like I said we can talk a little bit about life histories and strategies with each group because there's such a wide diversity I don't want to make too many blanket statements at the beginning so we can learn a little bit about these different groups of bees as we go so like I said bees is going to get hectic so we have a flowart to deal with this and then also the two pages after that kind of put them into to their different groups and have pictures so just like butterflies these are the morphog groups for bees we're definitely not going to get bees down to species for visual monitoring except for honeybees everybody else we're going to have to just write down the morphog group and remember with morphog groups things are grouped based on what they look like not necessarily how closely related they are for butterflies things followed a really nice pattern and the families of butterflies tended to look similar unfortunately for bees that's not always the case so things might get a little bit I don't want to say confusing things might get a little bit um hairy maybe as we going through but I'll walk us through it these are our Morpho groups for our bees we have honeybees which is probably the easiest and the most important group to know for our monitoring then we have bumblebees that are fuzzy and big large carpenter bees that are they have shiny butts longh horn bees that have long antenna longh horns uh turret and digger bees which are medium big bees we'll get into what that means in a minute leaf cutter bees mining bees which are both striped small to medium size and we'll get into the difference between those two metallic bees tiny bees which is very fun and then are cuckoo bees which kind of look like wasps so again again it gets a little challenging for bees but that's why we like it it's fun keeps us on our toes so here's our flowchart we're going to keep referring back to this throughout the entire presentation so when we do bee monitoring something that helps us out is that we only record bees that are actively using flowers so we if a bee is flying we don't record it if a bee lands on a leaf we don't record it the bee has to be on a flower actively using it I guess they could be sitting on it but they're usually walking around and rolling around and all that pollen on top but they have to be using a flower to be counted and that actually really helps us out because if you had to try to identify everything that was buzzing past you during the monitoring it would be impossible so the easiest thing to do is while you're doing the monitoring look for flowers that are blooming and then look in each flower and see if there's a bee using that flow for us at our Titusville site like I said it's sort of similar to a wild flower Meadow so there's a lot of flowers to look at so it's fun um and then for you guys at the rain Garden you might have an easier time scanning because you have more grasses and things like that so you might be able to scan and look at individual flowers more easily and look for bees so our sites are kind of different but that's what's good we'll get information about these different types of plantings in these different areas and see how many bees we have again that relative abundance and then what groups of bees we're seeing so if you're walking around and you see something on a flower like a little black dot but you're not sure what it is but you see it moving so you know it's a bug you can write unknown flying insect or unknown insect ufi if you keep walking and you see something a little bit closer up and you can tell it's either a bee or a wasp but you're not sure which you can write hopter which would cover you for bees and wasps and ants um and soft flies and if we keep walking and then we see something that we know is a bee but we have no idea whether it's a honey bee or a native bee you can write unknown bee the most important distinction if you see a bee is the difference between a honey bee and a native bee that's what we care about the most and the protocol that our monitoring is based on actually just stops there for their monitoring that they do in other parts of the country they just have volunteers right whether it's a honeybee or whether it's a native bee and that's it but I decided that I wanted to make things more fun and get into the different groups of native bees to see sort of what you know types and groups of bees were're getting so if you're doing monitoring and you can just differentiate between a honeybee and a native bee that's really the most important thing that's actually all we really need to do to get this done I just like a challenge and decided that we were going to go above and beyond to get information on the different kinds of bees we have because they're all so cool and they're all Al different I wanted to get a little bit more information are we seeing metallic bees are we seeing bumblebees because those are so different so and we can do it we can tell them apart one is green and small and one is Giant and fuzzy so we're totally capable of putting them into these smaller groups but the most important thing is whether it's a honeybee or whether it's one of the hundreds of native bees that we have that's the most important distinction to make and it's probably the easiest one so we'll hop into honey bees first these are our non-native bees again um white settlers brought these to North America from Europe and we've had them here ever since we love our honey bees I love honey and we also love being able to eat and honey bees help provide pollen for a lot of our agricultural crops we spread pollen around um and pollinate those crops that we rely on for food a lot of our fruits and vegetables are pollinated by honey bees a lot of them are also pollinated by native bees though that are just here living in Florida and North America and will pollinate those plants for us as well but we brought honeybees specifically to help with crop pollination and then to be able to eat the honey so honey bees are medium-sized bees we kind of use them as a reference for other sizes so they're about a half an inch long from their head to their abdomen um their abdomen is sort of torpedo shaped they're not super Round And Chunky but they're not pointed like a wasp um they have stripes on their abdomen they can kind of vary in color they can be kind of Darker to lighter sort of goldish orange color um they are known to be methodic Flyers so they go from flower to flower pretty determent and they do kind of make a buzzing noise when they fly by so this is the bee that we probably it's similar to the Monarch this is the bee we all know throughout all of North America is our honeybee um so as we go through these pictures um you'll see you'll recognize our North America's most iconic bee so they tend to have the honey color near their thorax um and you all have seen these guys usually also as like cartoon characters and on the save the bee posters and um I hate to be the be bad news but these aren't the bees that really need saving um because you can think of bees like little flying cows they're managed by people we brought them here they're um like an agricultural livestock sort of really tiny they're like our tiny little cows so we can breed more and bring more if we need more we like supplement their populations it's really horrible to have a crash in honeybees for us and obviously for the honeybees but for the natural system it doesn't really impact our native um preserves and natural systems it just impacts our honey and because we love those cute little guys but the bees we need to save on our save the bee poster should be some of our Florida native bees that we're losing in our natural wild species does that make sense think of them as little flying [Laughter] cows okay so that's our honeybee again the most important distinction is just from a native bee and a honey bee so if you saw this bee on a flower you would know that's not a honeybee so you could just write native bee and that's perfect because then we have an idea of how many Native bees we're getting because honeybees are our little flying cows the amount that we get in a garden or a restoration area really just has to do with how close the closest managed Hive is so especially um a lot of our local beekeepers will move bees around based on the season to different areas of natural managed areas or their own Farms so for us at our Titusville Garden in the beginning we had a ton of honeybees um and the reason that we keep track of honey H bees separate from native bees is because we had all those honey bees there because we had a hive nearby and then somebody must have moved those hives because I haven't seen any in a while so the presence of honey bees doesn't really tell us if our habitat is conducive it just kind of tells us that somebody has honey bees nearby so that's why it's so important for us to document our native bees which fall into these six major families so these families are different than the Morpho groups these are actual taxonomic families of bees so so we have appid which are our big bees our bumblebees carpenter bees Longhorn bees turret and digger bees then we have our helay bees which we have there are some metallic bees in those categories have megga kyod bees uh those are Leaf Cutters we have our mining bees our andren um we have this group called plaster bees which is pretty cool we'll talk about those in a little bit too and then um meled bees we're just going to kind of skip because we don't have them that's more like Tallahasse very North Florida and then there's a group called cuckoo bees and a group called tiny bees and they're found in all of those six major families so for all the native bees all of our 315 or 320 species depending on who you talk to they all fall in those different um Family groups and then they play out into this beautiful flowchart that I made and try to make everything come together we're going to have to do a little bit of editing to our flowcharts uh at some point that'll be later on so we might have a break in between so you all will need a pen because there's some stuff we need to add into here that I did not have time to do before we started our presentation but it'll help us with um ID when we go out in the field so the first group we're going to talk about again when we're walking through the garden we have these big overarching groups we have unknown flying insect if you have no idea what it is hopter if you know it's like a bee waspish bug then we have unknown bee for if you know it's a be but you can't tell if it's a native be or a bumblebee then we have honeybee or native be once you start to get better at B ID and go okay that was a honey bee that one some sort of native be and then our first Native be group that we're going to Branch off to are big bees so you can use big be as a group as well when you're doing monitoring so if you see a bee fly by that is around an inch or I should say bigger than a half an inch those would be considered big bees um so we have bumblebees large carpenter bees Longhorn bees turret and digger bees and those are all of our groups of big bees that you can see in the pink so the first big be group we're going to dive into is bumblebees which is also another pretty well-known group of bees so bumblebees all belong to the Gen bombus and we have five species in Florida again with bees we're not getting to species but I like to show you all of the species in that category so you can kind of get an eye for what a bumblebee is so they're large to very large so um usually around an inch or 3/4 of an inch and their entire body is fuzzy there are little teddy bears so they're kind of one of our bigger B groups very fuzzy um they can be sort of yellowish orange black they do make a buzzing sound when they fly because they're quite large um and you can see on this female Bumblebee a pollen loaf on her leg so that little if you can see my cursor that little wet looking ball is a it's some pollen that she packed on there with kind of like saliva and made a little loaf tucked it in there it's uh some people will call them bees grocery bags so that's her little grocery bag that she got from the flower and goes home and puts that little loaf underground for her or usually for bumblebees in a log or in like a brush of grass for her young um this is our only native bee that has a social structure similar to a honey bee so they do have sort of this generational situation where they produce the first sort of group of Offspring and they kind of do that similar thing with honeybees where they all have different jobs and then they eventually um produce a queen and then she goes off and starts a new Colony so a little bit like that honeybee structure a little bit more complicated whereas the rest of the Native bees are super solitary and they just leave the loaf and never interact with their offspring again kind of like sea turtles but with little pollen loafs underground so these are our bumblebee species common eastern bumblebee so you'll see the abdomen is fuzzy pay attention to that that's the key identifier for bumblebees is they're fuzzy all over so again that butt or that abdomen is fuzzy brown belted bumblebee fuzzy two spot of Bumblebee fuzzy fuzzy this be is actually um on the um red list for international conservation so it's known on an international level to be endangered which is a pretty big deal on the Southern Plains bumblebee but again it's fuzzy and it's like an inch big so it's a big bee and it's fuzzy and that's our bumblebees so big fuzzy bees teddy bears of the sky and of the flowers um our next group of big bees we'll get into is the group that's most easily confused with bumblebees and it's large carpenter bees all of our large carpenter bees are in the genus xylocopa and there's actually only two species so pretty easy um one thing that makes it a little trickier is there's a mimic species so there is a uh leaf cutter bee that pretends it's a carpenter bee but I'll tell you how to tell the difference same thing with the vice Roy it's mimicking that um other group so large carpenter bees look very similar to bumblebees they're around that same size about an inch they're actually can be a little larger than bumblebees they're usually an inch where bumblebees can be less than an inch um very large the big difference is they have shiny butts so bumblebees have fuzzy butts large carpenter bees have shiny butts shiny abdomen so we'll go through oh and leaf cutter bees or sorry carpenter bees are the ones that people don't like as much because they do make nests in wood so they will burrow little holes into wood structures H yeah their holes are uh pretty perfectly round they will use they like untreated wood so if your wood is treated you're not supposed to see them as much um and they can't they're not like termit they won't do extensive damage it's just a little hole I think it's cool to see them but I know some people get upset when it be Burrows into their wooden structure like their house so I understand that um but again these carpenter bees you know they carpenter bees because they have those shiny abdomens or shiny butts so here's one species the southern carpenter bee and the Eastern carpenter bee I did a poor job you you can't tell these species apart because of the coloring of their thorax um I should have included a picture of males and females on both slides because that's where that difference comes from so this B being all black and this one having that yellow isn't that's you can't identify them to species that way because I want to say it's a southern Carpenter B I think this is a female and then the males have yellow on them I just didn't have a picture of a male on the slide so again we're not getting anything to species for B you just see that shiny butt and you write large Carpenter B and that's it and then this is our mimic this is the carpenter mimic leaf cutter so you can see this bee actually has fuzz underneath its abdomen on the bottom side and that is a characteristic of a leaf cutter bee which we'll get into in a little bit I love leaf cutter bees but um this guy is a little bit smaller than the large carpenter bees and if you see that fuzz underneath the abdomen you know it's not a real carpenter bee it's this mimic um but again if you just write large Carpenter B we're including this mimic in that group so you have your bases covered you don't need to differentiate you can just write large Carpenter B because then when we do our analysis we know the large Carpenter B includes the two real Carpenter B's and the fakey so we're aware next group we'll get into is actually a category within a category so you see the red which is our Big B category and then we have the three pink boxes underneath two of those pink boxes you see in sort of a on the flowchart it's easier to see you have the blue bracket that says medium Big B on the flowchart and then on the PowerPoint you kind of have that rainbow shape uh that says medium big be so we're going to talk about the medium big be category which covers turret bees digger bees and Longhorn bees because all those guys can look kind of similar so we needed an overarching category for those besides Big B so a medium big be is a bee that's bigger than a honey bebee usually kind of chunkier than a honeybee but not big enough to be a carpenter bee or a bumblebee so you know it's not a carpenter bee you know it's not a bumblebee but it's still Big And Chunky we're going to put it in the medium Big B category and this includes Longhorn bees and turret and digger bees so we'll get into those groups and you'll kind of get a better idea of what I'm talking about so again medium big bees is anything that's a half an inch so the size of a honeybee and bigger but you know it's not a carpenter bee and you know it's not a Bumblebee which again that seems like a big task right now but once you start seeing them outside it'll all click I promise so Longhorn bees are really cool when you see male Longhorn bees unfortunately females don't have the long antenna but they have super long antenna that look way too big for their bodies so they're pretty easy to identify because of that um we have around 20 24 species of Longhorn bees in Florida and again they're usually the size of a honeybee or bigger and they just have antennas that seem way too big for their body so you'll know that it's a longhorn bee because of that unfortunately female bees don't have those Longhorns instead they have robust tin legs or as I like to say because it's easy to remember they have really thick thighs or fuzzy leg warmers they're legs are really fuzzy and really thick compared to other bees but there are a lot of female bees with really thick fuzzy thighs so it can be hard to differentiate just because of that for our monitoring purposes I would only write Longhorn B if you see a male and you see a bee that actually has long horns or antenna um if you just see a bee that has really fuzzy legs that's not enough to put it in this category so you would just write Big B or medium Big B depending on how certain you were um because again Big B is the overarching c atory so any of these bees we're talking about right now can be put in the Big B category and then as you move down from there you can get more specific but again you don't have to and you can even just put native bee you're just like I know this isn't a honey bee and it's a bee so it's a native bee um but here's some pictures of some of our Long Horn bees you can see it looks like a male on that picture of the bee upside down because its antenna is passing through the flower past the bee again the male's on the left with the really long horns and then the female has really fuzzy hind legs another one just with really long antenna so if you see them on a plant you'll notice like this guy the antenna is like as long as his body is so that's a little obnoxiously long for the bee and then you can see in this photo again the male Longhorn with the really long antenna and then the female that would be more of like a normal B antenna size on the right whereas the male on that little stick there has really really long antenna again here's some more so if you see a bee with a really long antenna you know it's a longhorn bee pretty easy yeah mm it has hair on it they're just going to be smaller than bumblebees yeah cuz Bumblebees are really large and really fuzzy because the the two bees you'll probably get confused are carpenter bees and bumblebees because they're both the largest but one has the fuzzy butt and one has the shiny butt these guys are probably like the next size down um yeah and they're all bees are fuzzy in general the fact that carpenter bees have little hairless abdomen is unusual yeah usually bees are pretty fuzzy okay here's more Longhorn bees again sort of bigger than a honeybee but smaller than a bumblebee with really long antenna okay so those were all of our Longhorn bees now our last big bee group um turret and digger bees it's actually two groups of bees but they look so similar that there isn't a point in separating them for our morphog groups and like Longhorn bees these are also considered medium big bees so if you see them you can put big be because that means you're not sure which of these four categories it's either a turret digger bee a longhorn bee large carpenter bee or a bumblebee those are all considered big bees so if you can't tell them apart yet you just write Big B because they're all bigger than a honeybee if you start to be able to differentiate that that's when you're going to get into writing Bumblebee versus large carpenter bee versus Longhorn Bee versus turret SL digger bee so these guys are pretty interesting they will make their little houses turret bees will make these little turrets or chimneys that they'll go in and out of and their house will be inside of that they make it out of water and dirt um and then digger bees kind of vary in their nest construction a lot of them Nest underground and I'm pretty sure sure these are the bees that will sometimes spay out on top of the water to collect water to build their little chimneys um almost like you can think of a water bug or a water spider where they'll be on the water with their legs spread out so as to not fall through and use that water uh surface tension to hold them up so they make these cute little houses and again they're they're kind of a you can think of our medium big bees as Bumblebee honeybee combos so they're not not huge and fluffy like our um Bumblebees are but they don't look like a honeybee either so they're kind of a mix of the two so you'll see this guy again they're usually the size of a honeybee a little bit bigger it's kind of like a miniature bumblebee they're just a little bit smaller than the other bees in that group um we don't see medium big bees as much in the garden but every once in a while we'll have one and it really does it's like a honeybees sized bumblebee so they're a little rounder um have different colors on the honeybees do but they're just not quite as big as those Bumblebees are and we have a couple and you see they um those little legs sometimes will like I said sprawl out on the water to collect to make their little chimneys um you can see the bee's tongue in this digger bee picture sticking out going into that flower so that's the tongue of the bee for that flower that's uh buzzing around um on the left it looks like and then our blue Digger B forages on blueberry plants specifically which we do have um Florida native blueberry plants and they'll time their emergence is the same as the blueberry plant uh which is really cool and they specifically pollinate those plants so the cool thing about Native bees versus honey bees is native bees can be very specific and they'll pollinate one family or one type of plant whereas honey bees can just kind of generally pollinate flowers that are easy to pollinate some of our native bees will go for a specific species that would be a little harder for honeybees to get to let's say um like some of our really pretty Florida let's say like orchids or specific native plants that are only found in Florida will have bees that pollinate those plants specifically have a specific relationship with them so those are all of our big bees so again you see any of those guys you can write Big B once you start to get a little better at the identification you can get into those more specific categories anybody have any questions about big bees go ahead okay um is it like a bigger be okay yeah so the the carpenter bees can be kind of aggressive um but it's usually the males that will like be those guard bees yeah well it can't St you they don't have stingers yeah yeah and they'll buzz you but they can't sting you so male bees don't have stingers so any male bees don't they can't sting only female bees can sting because it's the same the um female be sex organ that deposits eggs is the same organ that can sting so males don't deposit eggs so they don't have that organ so male bees can't sting it's just the women that it sting um and most bees most of our native bees can actually sting you if they want it it's super rare I've I catch bees in the net and handle them with my hands and they've never stung me um but our native bees can actually sting you and then keep stinging you it's not like honeybees that sting you once and then get stuck um honeybees unfortunately for them have barbs on their stinger so the Barb will go into maman's skin and get stuck and then when they try to fly away it'll rip the Barb out but um our native bees don't have barbs on their Stingers so they can sting you over and over but I again been doing this for a few years now and I will catch them in a net and I'm like putting them in a vial and touching all over and they've never stung me so they're mostly big fakers they won't actually sting you um so now we'll go ahead and hop into our next category so our two big categories are the Big B category and then the small to medium B so everything that's considered a big be is a half an inch or larger and everything that's considered a small to medium be is half an inch or smaller so this is when we get into some of our colorful bees and our tiny bees and sort of our more fun diverse species all of those big bees again are our honey bees our large carpenter bees our Longhorn bees and our turret and digger bees um bigger fuzzier these guys is where we really get into some of the more diverse species so we have a category with brackets that's small to medium striped bees and we have two major boxes in there we have leaf cutter bees and mining bees that is sort of misleading um because mining bees that box category is actually made up of a couple different types of bees so we will get into that and this is where we're going to have to get our pens out and write a little bit on our sheets so leaf cutter bees are all in the same family they make it easy for us and they all have hairy bellies so that's how we tell our small medium straped bees apart is mining bees have a smooth belly and leaf cutter bees have a hairy belly and that's how you tell the difference so with that being said if you're not you know if you don't have the flower right in front of you and you can't bend it and look right underneath the bee's belly it can be hard to tell which one is which so we just use category small medium striped bee to cover all of the leaf cutter bees and all of the mining bees any bee that is a half an inch to um3 in in size which we'll pass around um and are small that medium size and have stripes on their belly we can just call them small to medium stripe bees if you do happen to see if they have hair on the underside of their abdomen then you can put them in the different category ories but um small medium striped be is fine we see a lot of small medium striped bees in our monitoring go ahead yeah I yeah so when people talk about Africanized bees they're talking about Africanized Western honey bees so it's still you would put it in the honeybee category um I can't tell the difference between and they don't there's a um there's a more appropriate term that people are using now instead of Africanized be which I can't think of off the top of my head yeah yeah um they're just a more aggressive species of honeybee or yeah are they their own species or are they just a sub species yeah I for monitoring sakes don't worry about it um the yeah yeah and for Killer Bees it's they're yeah they're just more aggressive um which is UN yeah another cool thing about Native bees versus honey bees is native bees since they usually are solitary they don't have a hive to defend so that's why they typically don't sting because they're just off on their own they don't have to protect a hive whereas with honeybees they do have hives that they want to protect so that's why they tend to sting people more because they are protecting a hive of individuals whereas for our solitary bees They Don't Really Care it's just them on a flower so they tend to not sting um Africanized bees again that's not the correct term I just can't remember what the correct term off the top of my head that they're using more and more to describe those bees they're a a group of more aggressive honey bees so if you saw one you would think it was a honey bees so just going to R down honeybee yeah yeah because they they're just same thing as a honeybee they just that um subsection of honeybees again I can't remember if they're a sub species or if it's just like the area that they're from they tend to be more aggressive and that's um and I don't even think they necessarily always come from Africa I think some of them come from the tropics so again that the terminology has changed as we've learned more information but for the life of me I just can't remember what it's called what was that yeah so I um if you are allergic to stinging insects maybe B monitoring might be a little treacherous at times but like I said I've never been stung and most people aren't because especially with Native bees they really like they'll land on you and drink some sweat and fly away again I haven't had that happen to me unfortunately but I'm waiting for the day I guess I'm not sweaty enough or I'm not there at the right time but one day um so back to our small to medium striped bees uh we passed around our sizes and um again it just has to do with the amount of hair on their bellies so the first group we'll talk about is actually our leaf cutter bees so again they're all the same family this name leaf cutter bee for the category is very appropriate every bee listed underneath is considered a leaf cutter bee species so most of them are kind of black and white striped some of them get kind of colorful we have around 75 species of leaf cutter bee in Florida and all of our leaf cutter bees make their homes by cutting little pieces off of leaves um or using plant material and then making these little teeny tiny cells um for their individual eggs so they'll take leaves they'll make these little cells they'll lay an egg they'll leave a pollen Loaf and then fly off never to be seen again there's not much parental care going on with these insects um but you can see on the top is a leaf cutter bee then in the middle is an example of a resin bee that uses plant resin to build the nest and then on the bottom I guess would be a bee that's using mud but again these are all uh different types of bee nests and they'll usually construct them in um Hollow stems of plants so if you do have some plants that look dead um or dried out on your property you can either collect up those stems or just leave those plants and leaf cutter bees will Nest inside of the stems of the hollowed out sort of dead plants so they are really important nesting habitat for bees cuz not only do we need flowers in a bee habitat we also need that material for them to nest in because again if a bee only can fly a thousand feet to get food you want to make sure that they have food and shelter all in the same area female bees will um sleep in nests whereas male bees just kind of sleep on flowers and plants out in the garden um and again these this is a picture that we're passing around of the different leaf cutter bee resin bee and M and be nests we also have Pebble bees which are really cool uh we have an endemic pebblebee and they'll use Pebbles to make their nests just little tiny and they'll just stick the Pebbles onto a plant at the base of the plant and have their nest there so yeah not most of our bees don't have hives with honey most of them Nest like this well I would say 30% of our native bees nest like this and then the other 70 Nest underground which we'll talk about in a minute so we'll hop into our leaf cutter bees all of these guys are sort of more robust they're stockier looking um and when you see a leaf cutter be on a flower a lot of times they'll be holding their abdomen up in the air because again it's fuzzy underneath that's how they collect pollen so they'll kind of be doing a little like butt bounce little booty bounce on the flower and sticking their butt up in the air and flying around and bouncing all over the place they fly really fast I have a hard time catching these guys um which again is a great little challenge but they're compared to mining bees they're stockier they're more robust and again they have hair on their belly sometimes you can't see the hairy belly in these photos in this one you can underneath that bee that's on the white flower and again keep in mind the size of these bees so the photo on the let me make sure I'm looking the right way yeah the photo on the left which was taken by Dennis sitting in the FR row um it was taken on this flower Biden's albow so you can see how little this flower is and the bee really just takes up the yellow portion of the flower so again they're about 3 to5 in so they're not huge and unfortunately for us doing monitoring that's considered a small to medium siiz bee we're not even to the small to tiny bees yet this is kind of an average be size unfortunately for us in our eyes but again they're kind of stocky they actually have really strong mandibles in the front so they can cut the leaves and cut the plant material to build their nest so they're strong they might be small but they're mighty mighty little bees um so again now we're getting into some more color um and you can tell that this bee has a fuzzy abdomen because of all the pollen that's stuck to it so even if you can't see the hairs if you see a bee that I've heard described look like a flying Cheeto because they have so much pollen stuck to their abdomen that is a leaf coat be cuz they carry their pollen on their belly especially the females because again they're collecting it to bring it back to their young so they're collecting it on their Underside which According to some people makes them look like a flying Cheeto so now we're getting into a category of leaf Cutters that we call our color Cutters so if you see a stocky bee that's yellow or red you can actually get more specific and write down color cutter if you recognize it so this is one of our color cutter bees again there instead of just having White Stripes it's yellow they're very thick like the rest of the leaf Cutters have really strong mandibles and they'll be carrying their pollen underneath their belly here we're getting a little bit more red this is a really cute yellow one as you can see they're stocky looking they do compared to the other bees we'll see they're stronger they're not as Slender and they Bounce Around they're really fast but bouncy um here is a red leaf cutter bee um bees have round abdomen or are round butts compared to wasps so you will see a lot of red wasps but usually their abdomen will be pointy which we'll talk about at the end we'll do some bee versus wasp quizzing um and then this bee is only found in Florida and we have found it in our Titusville Garden so that's very exciting we've gotten pictures of it there so the Florida pebblebee it builds its house out of little Pebbles that it'll attach to the base of plants and it's the only pebblebee that's red in all of the United States all the rest of the pebble bees are yellow but in Florida we have this special red Pebble bee so if you all see this bee should be very excited because I was um because they're only found here but they're the only people in the whole world who will see this bee in the wild and again this bee now we're getting kind of small this one is about 3 in but it has a fuzzy belly um and a little bit of striping on the abdomen and there's no pictures of this bee that I could find alive but that's what it looks like so that's all our Leaf Cutters again they're they're about 3 to5 Ines that we passed around they tend to be a little bit stockier not as Slim they carry pollen on their belly so you'll see them sticking their butt up in the air and uh sometimes they look like a flying Cheeto depending on how much pollen they have next are the bees that look most like them the mining bees but mining bees don't carry pollen on their abdomen they carry pollen on their leg legs so their legs will be covered in pollen not their abdomen sometimes their thorax will have pollen on it but you can see in this picture the abdomen the underneath isn't all yellow instead it's their legs that are all yellow so that's the difference which isn't too much of a difference when you're looking with your eyes on a 90 degree day in the middle of July so again you can just write small medium striped B because it has stripes and it's small to medium size and that's really all we need to know and again if you just know it's not a honeybee you can just write native be and that's perfect because we're just trying to get the number of bees that we have and a little bit of diversity information so this mining be category is a little bit misleading it really should be smooth belly be but I thought that having to write smooth belly bee on the data sheet over and over again was kind of a lot so that's why I chose to use mining be as the term instead but our mining be category is also made up of plaster Furrow and nomina bees so on your flowchart I would recommend under in the leaf cutter B box under leaf cutter B writing the word hairy belly and then in the mining B box write the word smooth belly because again I also I guess it would have been comical to be looking through data sheets and just like typing out hairy belly and smooth belly over and over again but decided to go with a little bit uh less funny names I guess so again under leaf cutter beef you write hairy belly and then under mining bee write smooth belly and then we're going to add some more stuff under mining bee the first two genuses that are listed those two names you can put a bracket and write mining that way you know those are the two real mining bees the andrena and copsis are the two real mining Beast uh genuses so you can write a bracket and write Mining and then the next one down klees um you can put there if you have room maybe on the other side I alternated mine um those are plaster bees so you can write plaster like on the slide for klees and the next one down helus those are Furrow bees so you can write Furrow there and then the last two genuses nomia and dunia those are that last name on the slide the Nom n however you want to say it but you can write that as the group for the last two so that way I'm not just lying to you that they're all mining bees because they're not but they're all smooth belly bees so they all went under the mining bee category so again under mining be we have smooth belly the first two genuses underneath the Box are mining bees the next one down the klees is plasterer the next one down that's helus that's Furrow and then the last two are the Nomine Beast so that way it doesn't look like I'm fooling you I we do know what they actually are but they all just fit well under the mining be category all right does that make sense to everyone have that all written down I um would have typed it out for you but this was Friday afternoon that I realized it wasn't on there so sorry but it's good gets everybody involved you have to help make part of your flowchart so just some extra info so all of our mining bees have smooth bellies and you can remember they have smooth bellies because they're digging holes in the ground so you don't want a fuzzy belly covered in pollen when you got a tunnel so this is an example of mining bee little nests and Burrows here's a very blurry picture it's the same thing um we wrote on there plaster be on your guide uh plaster bees actually produce this cellophane like substance from their body that they line their nest with to help keep them from flooding which is really great for Florida to keep water out of your burrow when you dig in the ground um so that is why plaster bees are their own sort of group because they produce this substance from a specific gland that they have and then they mix it with saliva and they coat their nest entr to try to keep the water out um and then Furrow bees are sort of similar to bumblebees and honeybees where they're a little bit more social so some of the species are completely solitary aren't social at all some of the species will share a nest entrance like multiple females will share one interest and then they have their own brood cells that they go to and keep it separate but then there's some species that are actually social where mothers and daughters and sisters all share the same entrance but then also help take care of each other's Offspring so kind of differing Lifestyles within even the same family so be bees get funky um before we hop actually we'll go through mining bees really quick and then we'll take a little break and then we'll get through the last couple fun sections so we'll just get through the rest of mining bees and then we'll call it for another like five or 10 minutes so here are mining bees again very similar to leaf cutter bees that's why they're both in the small medium be category but again they have smooth bellies and instead they carry their pollen on their legs so you can see a pollen kind of loaf on this Bee's leg over here so that's what makes it a mining Bee versus a leaf cutter bee again the and you can see these bees are a little bit more slender they're around the same size as the leaf cutter bees but they're not as tough and round and robust looking they're a little bit more slender again they're they're digging little Burrows in the ground whereas leaf cutter bees are chomping on leaves and cutting plants apart and have to be a little bit stronger I don't know I made that up but that's how I'm trying to remember the difference leaf cutter bees are more robust these guys are Slimmer on this mining bee on the left you can really see the yellow pollen on its legs you can kind of see it on the right too so again carrying pollen on their legs not their belly because they have smooth bellies and fuzzy legs again here's some more pollen on the legs for our mining bees now we're getting into cellophane bees and plaster bees are the same thing so these are those bees that coat their entrances and kind of a saliva substanc waterproofing that they make and then our fur o bees we see a lot in our Titusville Garden we'll see what you guys get um but you can just consider these guys mining bees this picture is important to pay attention to the picture that it looks like it has pollen on its belly that's why we have the overarching category of small small medium striped bee because sometimes bees just end up covered in pollen and it's when they're real you'll see them sometimes just coated there pollen all over them I'll catch them in the vial and the vial will just get covered in pollen so sometimes it can be hard to tell just by pollen placement so it's good to have that small medium striped B category and again smooth bellies striped about a half an inch to um about a third of an inch in size and those are all our mining bees so we're almost done with bees already we've done all the big all the big bees we've done our all of our small medium striped bee so we just have tiny bees metallic bees and cuckoo bees which are all really interesting so we'll go ahead and take a break now so we can walk around for a minute let some of the information settle into your brain and then we'll uh we can come back in what do we think like five or 10 minutes okay we'll do five minutes so we'll be back at 2:15 e e e e e e e e e e e a little bit more exciting I think um and fast because we got to go outside soon so we'll just get through these guys um nice and quick and um now we're getting into where things get really colorful so these other guys are probably the hardest to tell apart um the next categories we're going to talk about the tiny bees the metallic bees and the cuckoo bees are the easiest I think to get down into the different groups because they look a little bit more distinct so our next group of bees is our metallic bees and this consists of metallic sweat bees and metallic Mason bees metallic sweat bees are more common you will probably or at least hopefully see these guys soon when you go outside um the metallic Mason bees are smaller and not as common so these are kind of the size of a honey bee are a little bit smaller same size as our small to medium striped bees except for these guys are metallic and shiny blue green color um we don't need to worry about where they're hairy or anything like that if you see a bee that's green or shiny and blue you just write metallic bee and that's perfect we do have two groups we have metallic sweat bees which are green and then our metallic um Mason bees you'll see them on the sheet they're a separate little category that's osmia so the metallic sweat are most of them and then there's the one genus osmia those osmia bees are small in blue we see those less so if you write metallic sweat be that lets me know that it's one of our green metallic sweat bees um so the osmia bees are smaller those would be the3 inches the smaller bee that we're passing around and then the green metallic sweat bees are bigger they're about the size of a honey bee that 0.5 in so I'll just go through these um here's a green metallic sweat be green metallic sweat bee very cool to see these guys they glisten in the sun they're beautiful again green means it's a metallic sweat bee green metallic sweat be green metallic sweat bee green metallic sweat bee so they all they're green some of them though will have brown and yellow stripes but at least part of their body is green and metallic so it is a metallic sweepy again another one that has actually like black and white striped abdomen but is green and metallic so it's a metallic sweepy now I'm not sure if you will see these at this site um at our Titusville site we don't see them because we're too far north for now but there is this is a non-native metallic green bee um they are bigger than our green metallic sweat bees uh they carry pollen differently these guys have pollen loafs our green metallic sweat bees don't uh make their pollen like that these guys actually hover more like flies they're like little helicopters whereas metallic sweat bees bees don't really hover too much they kind of just go flower to flower um these guys hover like little helicopters and they actually dangle their legs and they have these weird plated legs so if you see this bee you'll know you're like oh that is not a metallic sweat bee that's a different metallic bee um but we shouldn't be seeing them this far north I see them in Fort Pierce and in the southern part of the IRL but not this far north now these are those small blue metallic osmia bees so if you see a smaller about a half an inch to 3 in B and it's blue in metallic you would write osmia we don't see these as much um but again here they're blue instead of green so it would be osmia a little blue be again little blue be is osmia we don't see them often there's another shiny blue it's not green this time so it's osmia so those are all of our metallic bees most of what you'll see are those green ones those are metallic sweat bees um and if you see a bee and you're not sure if it's a blue osmia bee or a green metallic sweat be then you just write metallic be to cover your bases and then if you see a metallic be you should be able to tell that it's not a honeybee but for some reason if you're not sure you can write unknown bee but as you can see as we get further along um you can definitely start to tell the difference between these bees versus honey bees because that's the most important distinction so if you can tell if a green or if a bee is green and shiny it is not a honey bee so you can write native bee if you need to then you can get down to metallic bee or metallic sweat bee our next Group which definitely don't look like honeybees are tiny bees so tiny bees are made up of bees from all different families but the one thing they have in common is they are extremely small so think of the size of a grain of rice specifically short grain rice not even long grain they're really tiny um to fit into this category you have to be 0.1 to3 in um they're usually pretty slender in dark colors and these guys can crawl really deep into flowers because they're so small so again for beat monitoring we look at the flowers and see if there's anything using the flower so that makes it easier you don't have to catch these guys flying you just look at the flower and you say oh look at that Speck and you get closer you're like it's a bee or maybe it's a fly but hopefully it's a b somewhere so you'll see on the be that I'm passing around the cutout of the B is smaller than the magnet that I had to put it on so um we have these cool mask bees that are tiny bees but we're not going to be able to see the mask because they're so small but enjoy these up close pictures so you can see the mask and the intricate markings but they'll probably just like look like a little black Speck but we have many many tiny bees a lot of times we miss them we have the fiery Cyclops blood be which is very exciting but yeah these guys are all about the size of a graen of rice we have a species that's gold in [Music] color another gold be but all very tiny most of them dark good question it depends on what family they're in um so this is a this bee actually is a Florida small carpenter bee so they would probably nest in wood as well but they're just so tiny that we don't even notice um so this when you look at the slide that be is like oh it's a decent size but this is the flower that the bee is on so it's it's really tiny um we passed around this flower a couple times but we'll pass it around again for fun so this is when monitoring gets really fun and really difficult again if we don't see everything that's okay and if we just write native bee that's okay but we're just trying to get a general idea of how many bees we're attracting um some really cool tiny bees all very small and we're almost done we've gotten through all of our big bees like our bumblebees our carpenter bees our Longhorn bees our turret and digger bees then we went into our small medium striped bee which are Leaf Cutters and mining bees then we did our metallic and tiny bees now our last category is bees that look like wasps so it's our cuckoo bees uh these guys are really cool BEC well guess depends on who you ask whether they're cool or not but they are um kleptoparasitic bees so what they do is they don't they're not as fuzzy because they don't care about collecting pollen for their offspring because they actually don't take care of them what they do is they'll go into the nests of other bees and either kill the eggs um or little baby bees in there or they just lay their own eggs in there and then when they're Offspring hatch they kill the original bees and eat the pollen loaf that the mom had left for her Offspring so depends on who you ask whether that's cool or not but it's very interesting to say the least um but they look more like wasp because again they are not collecting pollen for their young they're just depositing their eggs in other bees houses in eating up the food food that was left for the original Offspring so they look more like wasps um since they're not as fuzzy they're not as much of key pollinators as the other bees but what's interesting about seeing cuckoo bees is you know that you have presence of a lot of native bees because they need those native bees to pray upon I guess um and to have that parasitic relationship so it indicates that you have a healthy bee population if you're seeing cuckoo bees and a lot of times a specific cucko bee species lines up with a specific family of bees that they um interact with and kind of steal from thank you so what one thing that's helpful about the cucko bees versus wasps is a lot of them have these kind of distinct triangular abdomen whereas wasps have poy abdomen but they're more round so you can see on this be it looks like you literally stuck a triangle on the bottom of it that's pretty indicative of a cuckoo be so again very triangular this starts to look a little bit more like a wasp so if you were to write wasp that's okay I probably would accidentally white write wasp too so um but they probably have a little bit more hair than a wasp does sometimes we have to take pictures and then use pictures to do identification later um again they start to look wasp like that's okay if if you're really not sure if it's a wasp or a B you can write hopter and that way you're covered it's a wasp SLB you can write wasp SLB if you'd like if hopter is too long to write it's both the same thing but when you see the bees with the triangle specifically like the first couple you know that that's a cucko be those are the easiest to identify so that's it for bees those are all the bees that you could see around Cape canil um what was that so um we have bees and wasps which look the most alike really quick just to give the rundown wasps are actually they're really closely related right they're all in the same order wasps are meat eaters they'll eat other insects whereas bees are vegetarian or vegans I guess they just eat pollen and nectar so they all evolved from the same bees evolved from wasp so originally they were all eating meat and then flowering plants started to evolve and bees were like hey let's do that let's go vegan so they all went vegan and started using plants instead but wasps are sleeker they're hairless um they're Predators so they are a little bit more intense looking they dangle their legs in Flight meanwhile bees are round they're flying Cheetos they're a little bit kutzer they're fluffy um they don't have to hunt they just fly flower to flower so there are little cotton candy with wings now bees and flies can also get confusing um flies only have two Wings bees have four but that's not a great way to tell because their wings are all sort of clear looking so it's hard to see the main helpful difference is their eyes so flies have those big eyes that kind of touch and meet bees have eyes on the side of their heads so that's the best way you can tell the difference is a fly eye versus a bee eye and then bees tend to be fuzzier flies do have hairs um flies have shorter thicker antenna bees have longer bent antenna especially a longhorn bee has really long antenna um and flies don't carry pollen they tend to hover more whereas bees kind of go flower to flower and don't hover in one place and again this is our road map so when you're doing your monitoring you see something on a flower that has wings but you don't know what it is you can write unknown flying insect and then get more and more specific from there same with the butterflies we want to keep things General and accurate rather than specific and incorrect so I would much rather have you write unknown bee or native bee then write the wrong group of Native bee but these are all of our morphog groups and all of the little tricks and tips so honeybees are North America's iconic bee we all know what a honey bee looks like torpedo shaped kind of golden colored then we have bumblebees big and fuzzy large carpenter bees have shiny butts Longhorn bees have LGH horns turret and digger bees are like honeybee bumblebee hybrids so small bumblebees leaf cutter bees are stocky with hairy bellies mining bees are a little Slimmer with smooth bellies and both leaf cutter bees and mining bees are small medium with stripes metallic bees are metallic tiny bees are teeny tiny and cucko bees look like wasps okay it's quiz time again I guess this is going to be our example so the question is it a bee yes is it a native bee or a honey bee this is one of our native bees this is a big bee and then specifically it's a large carpenter bee it's kind of hard to tell but it does have a shiny butt and actually it's cool what this bee is doing it's nectar robbing so instead of having to crawl through the flower and get covered in pollen to get the nectar it's actually cheating the flower and just using its mandibles to cut the flower open drink the nectar out and fly away without providing any pollinating services so um some hummingbirds and things do that in the tropics but our some of our big bees will do that they'll be big bullies so for all of the bees all of our native bees only females can sting and um none of them usually sting none of the Native bees usually sting they're quite friendly because they don't have a hive to protect I guess if anything Bumblebees are the only ones that kind of have a hive so they might be a little grumpier but the rest of them don't have anything to protect so looking at this guy is it a bee yes this is a bee it's covered in pollen yes is it a native bee or a honey bee so this is a native B So based on the size and the coloring or the stripes what group would we put this in yeah so that's this flower oh sorry about the microphone so that's this flower so this B is uh probably like3 in it has stripes so we're going to put it in the small medium striped B category it's hard to believe that that would be considered medium you could put small striped B and they that's fine because it is quite small we see this bee in our garden in Titusville a lot um and it does it has a smooth belly so what uh small medium straight B group would it Go in yes so this would be in the mining B group it's actually in that miny be group it's specifically a fur o b we see these guys in the garden a lot but again not expecting anybody to know it's a fur o b we just would probably write small medium striped B and if you noticed its belly was smooth then you would put mining B okay next is it a be I like the shore it is it is a bee um is it a native bee or a honey bee yes it is a native bee it's not golden it's a it's around the same size as a honey bee but it's a little bit chunkier stronger so our overarching group if it's kind of mediumsized and striped would be yeah so our uh small medium striped be and then uh specifically let's say it has a hairy belly it's bouncing its bottom on the flower yeah it would be a leaf cutter be and I will say butterfly ID is easier like in the classroom B ID I think is easier in the field because you can see how they're moving what they're doing and once you learn more about the groups you can kind of key in on how they're flying and figure out what they are okay so next B oh I already answered it is a be okay all right is it a native bee or a honeybee it is a honey bee so it's golden it's kind of torpedo shaped another thing honeybees like those grocery bags those pollen loafs so they'll make them into little balls and stick them on their thighs so it is a honey bee and that's the most important distinction if you can tell what a honey bee is you're good you're ready to monitor okay so now this one is it a be So It's Tricky so it is a bee yeah Wings can be really hard I wouldn't go by Wings personally it's too difficult for me to tell um so it is a bee it could have been a wasp um but it is a bee is it a native bee or a honey bee if it's red yeah it is a native bee um so it's it's red it's like small medium in size um this guy does have a hairy belly that you can't see in the photo um so what group would we put this bee in with a hairy belly yeah so it it's a leaf cutter bee and then in leaf Cutters we have yeah so it is a picture of a Florida Pebble bee great job um but we can call it a color cutter because it's a leaf cutter and it's colorful um when we have a red bee like that all of our red bees besides tiny bees and cuckoo bees go in the leaf cutter category they're all color Cutters which is a word I made up for this monitoring um but I think it helps they're colorful leaf cutter bees so we call them color Cutters and yeah specifically it's a Florida Pebble bee only found in our wonderful State of Florida so next one is this a bee oh did I go back backwards I went backwards no uh what do we think it is yep it's a wasp don't ask me what kind I don't know my wasps okay now this one is it a bee it is not a bee what is it yeah it has fly eyes it's a fly I think it's a plush back fly but don't quote me okay this was one that I caught is this a bee it's still alive I I catch him release he just looks very sad um yes it is a bee um is it a native bee or a honeybee native be there you go that's our most important distinction and you guys are you've got it it's a native be um okay what group would we put this be in so it has a triangular abdomen and it's it's a bully it steals things so this is a cuckoo bee it is kind of hard to tell the photo is through a glass jar so I will give you credit it's a little tricky to tell okay is this a bee yes it's very fuzzy um is it a native bee or a honey bee native bee great job and okay the overarching group according to the flow chart is it a big b or a small medium B it is a big bee so this is our plant I did bring this one this is our plant that it's on and it's taking up a good chunk of the flower and that is considered a big be so bees are all really small I guess they should really all be called small bees but in our you know lineup of bees it's one of the biggest ones and it's very fuzzy so if it's a big bee and it's very fuzzy what group would it be in yes bumblebee perfect okay next one is it a bee yes is it native or a honeybee native bee honeybees are not green in metallic so um our overarching group would be metallic B and then specifically is it a metallic sweat be or an osmia B metallic sweat be cuz it's it's green great job okay this one's tricky is it a be it is not a bee it is a wasp so you can see it's abdomen is pointy we talked about cuckoo bees and the ones that we can easily ID have a pretty distinct triangle this is just kind of comes to a point so that one is a wasp mhm they do pollinate as well yeah so they like to eat other bugs but they're also game for a little bit of pollination they're actually really really important pollinators um yeah they're they're you know open to different foraging and activities wasps are really really important pollinators too but for our sake we're just trying to encourage people to do more Florida friendly and Lagoon friendly Landscaping so I didn't think wasps were the way to get people excited I figured bees and butterflies are probably better groups to use um but again thank you all so much for sitting through this entire monitoring training you know all your bees now every single bee you could ever encounter so thank you all so much and we'll talk a little bit about the plants in the um Garden that we're going to go outside and explore in a few minutes all right okay hey everybody how's everybody doing good all right oh sorry yes thank you can everybody hear me okay all good okay um yeah so this is kind of the last little bit of the classroom and then we're going to be moving outside soon so we're we're getting there hanging there um this point is just going to look at the native plants that are in the garden the ones that were purposefully planted and the ones that we've come across just through observation that are growing there and um then some of the pollinators and just to let you know the the pollinators that are mentioned here it's just kind of like a brief overview it's not a comprehensive going through every single plant um and letting you know every pollinator that's there I get started so this is this is the um planting schedule for the rain Garden so this you know has a lot of detail in here which we'll we'll go see in person and these are this is a list of the 11 native species that were planted um so over 900 plants I think close to a thousand actually right were installed and there is an irrigation system to get those plants started um generally even native plants need a little um guarantee of enough water until they have you know gotten strong enough to to be on their own there uh there's no moow areas to protect those plants and then there are some educational plaques and I believe there will be more as well over the next few months and then let's see this is a I noticed um I did recognize a couple faces that were here during the the vol uner day where we came out and planted the last um 400 or so plants in the garden and then this here is what we'll be looking at on site so you will see these These are the native species um there are I think seven in here of the 11 and so we'll be looking at there's grasses the canas that are very colorful flowers um blue flag Iris cord grass viburnum saw paletto and swamp sunflower some of these names may be familiar with Emily's presentations she did talk about some of the plants that are hosts um and that provide nectar and so these are the other couple that were't in that other picture so saw palow again we learned how valuable that can be for much Wildlife swamp lies counties for the endangered atala butterfly and soft Rush which is a a grass species so this is I'm just going to go through this kind of quickly this is just to show you all of those individual plants that we just looked at um ironically I'm going to start out with a plant that I I couldn't really learn much about which uh insect pollinators because it's it's wind pollinated so here's just a little curve ball in here but very important um obviously it has other ecological benefits to the area uh can take in a lot of water and stay in standing water and still be healthy and another that is also wind pollinated it does provide habitat for birds and other Wildlife though fakahi grass um laral food plant for the ab Skipper butterfly so again one that you know we that Emily had talked about and again this is you know there are other pollinators that may benefit but just wanted to give an example or two and then swamp Lily and I think sir in the background you had mentioned early on about the hummingbird moth or the Sphinx Moth and that is um this is the larval host plant for this moth so we have got them in there so we may not be seeing those during survey obviously during the day but at night it's still an active Garden um and pollination and all going on and we have knas so providing nectar for insects bats and hummingbirds and very colorful too and again the saw paletto so this primarily is pollinated by bees um and again as as Emily had mentioned provides just a a host for so much Wildlife from the berries to the pollen swamp sunflower again another uh um plant that's primarily pollinated by bees blue flag Iris so this is pollinated by the longhorn and bumblebees so hopefully we'll get a chance to see some of these Longhorn bees um with those long antennas and we'll have to rely on this plant maybe to give us a chance to know the difference between our Bumble fuzzy butts and our Mason smooth smooth abdomen uh bees and then dwarf Walters VI burum so this has kind of a mass of flowers that um it produces so obviously attracts many uh pollinators to it and it just being at more of a hedge or bushy shape it kind of allows for birds and other Wildlife as well and slender Golden Rod tracks again various pollinators butterflies and bees a nectar plant for monarchs and others and Emily I have a question for you actually this picture this is one of those kind of tricky ones that I looked at and thought Oh that looked like a wasp when I first saw it but now kind of having gone through that I kind of go oh maybe that is a bee there yeah so that is that would be a tiny tiny hi leas okay a mass tiny bee then all right and then there are some CTI out there as well so like the you know the rare atala butterfly so that's that food source for the larvae of it so we can all get excited when we see this CTI start to look kind of bad we're like yes we know there's some activity happening and then these this is a list and again I'll go through a few of these um these are other native plants that we've noticed in the park uh over just the last couple months so in this picture um on the left is wood yellow wood swirl so a lot of these are very common considered weeds that you might find just kind of on any kind of along the sidewalk or in your yard but potentially can be beneficial to pollinators and other wildlife and then the other is cudweed on the right and then of course when we go out to the park all those beautiful Live Oaks that are out there um and here I have that it's the larval host for the red banded and white M hair streak butterflies and then also the Southern Southern Oak hair streak as well right um and probably a good opportunity maybe to even look for some of those U mimer butterflies as well and if you have anything to add Emily please do um Spanish needles or Biden's Alba that uh Emily had passed around with the little white petals on it so a nectar source for a lot of pollinators um I for butterflies and bees I do notice this kind of everywhere right now in flow it's the one that has the little seeds that get caught on your pants pretty easily um but yes a very very beneficial plant for pollinators frog fruit which again this one was passed around today that Tiny Little Flower um so the larval host plant for the common buckeye the fan Crescent and the white peacock butterflies a nectar source for bees as well so and I believe this is a metallic sweat bee is that right in the picture I think it might be a tiny be a tiny bee so small okay it would be easier to tell in real life but yeah I think that might be our Florida small Carpenter be small Carpenter oh yeah just Shin so so tiny cuz that flower is so tiny if it was bigger then definely and then pelor which also cucumber weed sometimes is called um it's a host for the red Admiral butterfly and you can eat it too I don't recommend right near the sidewalk but it really does taste like cucumbers but if you have kidney stones don't need it and then I believe this say lastly the pepperweed um and this one is very commonly seen too it has little seeds on it um and they actually can they've been used as a a substitute for pepper I think it's in the mustard family so it's a very strong uh flavor to it but pollinated by a variety of insects and larel host for the checkered White and The Great Southern white butterflies so I imagine we'll see a lot of them out there as well and then I think we're moving right into what is next Hol is going to come up and share yeah so we're just about to get ready to go out and check out the site and talk more about serving um and just sort of kind of practice what it is that we'll be doing um with some we'll be doing some fun things too but um when we go we have actually two kind of survey locations that we'll be doing at the site they'll be like a designated length um of walking um for our suring um I think Emily mentioned this before but we um pollent bees and butterflies are out during the day like midday so we're thinking of um around 11 o' either between 11 or noon will be like our start time um and we're going to try to survey um every other week or twice a month starting the first week in June um and we'll do that continuously probably through September um maybe October and then as the fall as we get into fall and some of the cooler months we'll just go to once a month um but we'll have a survey track that runs along the length of where the rain Garden is where all the plants have been put in and then a survey track that's identical on the other side of the park but that doesn't have any of the pollinated any of the plants and this is just so we can kind of compare the two sites basically um the northern site will be like what the park looked like before they started all the construction and putting in the plants and then the southern part will be um where all the plants are so we can see the differences um like Emily said before we're um collecting this data so that way we can um show the benefits of Florida friendly landscaping or Lagoon friendly Landscaping um and why you might want to put these plants in um into your own um home or garden um and so if we can kind of compare two sites that are very different but in the same area we can show why you potentially want to put in um these native plants and collecting data um that we can show longterm um what the pollinators and the diversity of pollinators that we'll see over time um we do plan on having like a kit that will be sto stored here where you'll come collect before you go out to survey and that will have data sheets um field guides it has um some B in it like everything you would need to actually go out and Survey um and because it's going to be stored here um right now surveying has to occur um like Monday through Friday and at 11 or noon um and we'll be Mandy and I will be working with you to schedule the times because we have to have not as not a lot of win and then having it be sunny um mostly sunny um for the when we'll actually be going out so there's some kind of weather considerations as well so again this is their survey location we'll get to walk out and see it um in a little bit um we also wanted to um incorporate um documentation of other Wildlife that you'll see so there will be after doing the official pollinator surveying we're going to be asking people to do like a like a five minute survey of just documenting all the wli that you see whether that be butterflies squirrels birds bees anything like that um because some of the areas that we're going to be the actual survey transect or the where you'll be walking we won't be able to see or document all of the Butterflies um because there's a huge area where there's gravel um where a lot of like the canas are and other flowery plants um which won't be technically part of like the scientific survey but we still want to be able to say hey I see a white butterfly over there so we're going to sort of have like a separate survey that we'll just be looking at basically collecting qualitative data so saying yes we've seen these kind of groupings of animals at the site as well that's not necessarily within the transect site um because we want to be able to collect as much data as we can um but also need to kind of stick to the sort of the protocol set aside as far as for the monitoring of the pollinators so as far as other resources for identification um we are going to be including a lot of field guides um in the kit that will that you'll be able to take out so that will have a lot of pictures and everything of the bees and butterflies you also have your um guide um that was handed out and there'll be another copy that's included in the kit but there's also a bunch of other places where you can go and find information about about um identification and just practicing including these and we'll can share this PowerPoint with you afterwards and then hopefully as you're just thinking about you know being out in the garden and being part of this project and just telling people about what you're doing you're also helping to support pollinators at home so maybe you'll be um motivated to include some of these plants like in your own garden if you're able to but just also thinking of other ways to kind to reduce um or to you know conserve water reduce um you know I guess trash and water and other things going into local storm drains um and just thinking of you know all the things that we can do to be kind of more sustainable within our our lives and again these are just a couple other resources for other organizations that promote um not only like native Landscaping um but also talk about um in this last bullet point green storm water infrastructure um the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has a whole website um dedicated to Green Storm water infrastructure and talks about all the different types of projects like a rain Garden um that's sort of incorp under encompasses under that um and they have webinars and um a lot of like um case studies so where they take pictures across the state of these types of infrastructure projects being um incorporated into different cities and stuff so that is the end of the official training as far as all of the Mounds of information that we're giving you here so um and I just want to thank Emily for um all of the information because she really took this on at the her Titusville office and we're really excited to have her bring this here um and it I know that I even just looking at the Powerpoints the for the first time a couple weeks ago and then listening today I know that I've already learned a lot so thank you so much Emily so we're gonna um go out to the site so you guys can see um what it looks like and we're going to do a little bit of activity um sort of just to practice um identification and walking um what the transect will be um oh and I also um I didn't mention before but when we are organizing like our kind of our first sampling of like coming out both Mandy and I and probably Emily as well we'll be coming out with you so we're all going to be learning together and kind of working on this project together so don't feel like I'm throwing you out there and just saying good luck we're going to be working with you throughout this processes too because we're learning as well and um excited to um kind of get out there too to document so why don't we take like five minutes to we're going to be leaving here so we're not going to come back to this room um so if you want to leave your clipboards or any pieces of paper that you didn't um write on on this table here um we'll keep those and if you want to put anything in your car um we can just walk to the site it's it's literally a block away so we're going to walk to the site and check it out um but this is your time to use the restroom um put stuff in your cart you need and we'll just meet um right outside underneath the the big awning at the front door