Olpea, thanks for responding. I have two mini peach trees left to re-pot and I was on the border to use potting soil for the last two or use up the (expensive) gritty mix on them. All other things being equal (the other *primary* pro's/con's that don't revolve around pest management), and since the trunk of these remain so small that a bad case of PTB may cause permanent damage, I was hoping the gritty mix would have a distinct advantage for borers. I don't know much about borers, but was my interpretation of the text correct: at specific stages in PTB they are forced to enter the soil to cocoon? If so, I would assume the magget looking worms would not take to the DE very well. If nobody can provide insight, I guess I won't know unless I harvest and test them myself ;-) I do paint the trunks and I don't have any hesitation to using pesticide to protect these little trees. Thanks for the advice, I always appreciate it when someone takes the time to respond even if they aren't sure of the answer. Peace.

Bees become fixated, when a nectar source opens, the bees concentrate on that source, becoming fixed on that and little else until the bloom period for that plant is over. If your blossoms open a few days after your neighbor’s blossoms, by the time your neighbor’s blossoms have finished, your blossoms are half over, and old blossoms do not pollinate well, if at all. If your statement were true, nothing in my back yard except the orange tree and then the queen's wreath would be pollinated, because blooms are prolific and bloom periods overlap. A certain proportion of the bees, the foragers, are always looking for the next good spot and recruiting other bees to come harvest what they have discovered. I have watched bees go from the creosote in full bloom to the bok choi blossoms a few feet away, and from the orange blossoms to the alyssum to the tomatillos. Those are foragers ... the ones waddling from orange blossom to orange blossom are the gatherers. On any given collection run a gatherer bee usually stays with a certain kind of flower, but a forager's "waggle dance" can recruit that bee to a different resource for the next run.

Oh man! I am so sorry for the delayed response I have never posted anything and thought that an email would be sent to me whenever someone followed up (I thought I clicked that option!)...anyway, I have tried to take pics of it but the egg-like thingies are so darn small that it only shows like a uniform white thing on them...I also looked it up on line and no pics or descriptions like mine anywhere...I will try to photograph it again today and see if I can come up with something somehow decent. Thanks for trying to help me jean001, I truly appreciate it.

I'm really upset! My resident female blackbird has taken two fully grown smooth newts out of my pond over the last couple of days. When it first happened at the weekend, I saw her and ran out but it was too late to save the poor thing. Very early this morning I saw her on the lawn with one and she swallowed it whole - just like a heron would do. Has anyone experienced this before? I feed all my birds and really look after them, so I'm really very unhappy with her. I was originally given four newts about three years ago, so I now feel I can't thin out any of the vegetation or clear the blanket weed, just in case there are any newt eggs in there. Big Kid