Holiday Gift ideas

Seasons greetings from the Rincon Vitova Team! We thought we’d throw in some useful gift ideas your way. From garden upkeep to children's activities, here are some a few items from The Bug Farm.

Deer nibbling your roses? Rabbits munching on your vegetables? Cats burying poo in your garden? Try a motion activated sprinkler! The Scarecrow is a great gift for the gardener with an animal problem. It has an infrared motion sensor and sprays a short blast of water at intruders. It is an attractive alternative to chicken wire or electric fences and work better than chemical deterrents. The passive infrared detector has a range of 105 degrees and adjustable sensitivity to detect animals up to 35 feet away. The Scarecrow can deter small animals such as birds, cats, skunks, and rodents and large animals such as deer, dogs, sheep, and even people. It comes with optional, high contrast “eye” and “beak” decals to scare birds visually. It is water conserving and only uses 2-3 cups of water per spray. Multiple Scarecrows can be connected to the same tap.


The Springstar Flea Trap is a super gift for pet owners in your life. It uses a small light bulb whose light, heat, and infrared rays are highly attractive to fleas. Fleas jump up to the trap, fall through a screen, and get trapped on the sticky pad. Replacement Capture Pads are 5x6, sticky on one side, and come three per package.

Get up close and personal with your favorite bugs! The World's Best Bug Jar is a great way to get to know your beneficial insects and their prey. This jar has a built-in 2x and 4x magnifying glass in the lid and a grid in the bottom to measure your specimen. Great for entomologists-in-training young and old. Four and five year old naturalists find this tool is of especially compelling value in their studies. Make a gift of a basic hand-lens for older insect ecologists.

We asked artist friend Alice Williams for an image of a green lacewing adult, also called “Golden-Eyes” and “Aphid Lion”. Her painting in acrylic is reproduced and laminated for unique placemats in subtle hues of red and green on a pale peach background with copper-colored border. The same image is also available as notecards in two sizes.

We also commissioned jewelry-maker Joyce Fritz to render a green lacewing adult in polymer clay. There are six pins still available from a limited edition of 12 fashion pins 1 ¾ inch long with 2 inch antennae.



You can check out the full version of our Holiday Gift Guide here.

Product Availability Week of Dec 8th

ALERT! While supplies look great for the coming two weeks, if you are planning to order beneficial insects from Rincon-Vitova Insectaries this month, note that Christmas and New Year’s holidays fall on Thursdays, which means that I will not be importing perishable items from Canada for the last two weeks of December. There’s plenty of time to order early or extra if necessary. The last shipping date for Stethorus, Fallacis, Delphastus, Aphidoletes, the lower priced Cryptolaemus, and the very limited supply of Atheta, is December 17th. Order by Friday noon of the previous week. These insects will not be available to ship again until January 7, 2009. Everything else will be available as usual, but shipped on Monday, December 22 and 29 (rather than the usual Wednesday shipping schedule for most imported insects). HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Day to Day: Wildfires!

From left, Jan, Ron and Duke position themselves to take in the fire.

With all the wildfires in California, we thought we’d post our own little slice of life.

A small hillside fire broke out approximately two miles west of the Rincon-Vitova Insectaries (RVI) around 4:45pm on Tuesday, October 22, 2008. While the late day skeleton crew clicked away at computer monitors, Kyra and Gabe had left early and called in from the road. “You could see the fire from the [RVI] driveway,” Kyra explains. “It looked really close, but driving towards it we realized just how far it was.”

“It was the perspective. At first we thought we might have to evacuate,” said Gabe thinking back on the fire. “We joked about picking which DVDs to leave behind.”

The fire’s distance from the insectaries didn’t ease everyone’s mind. Duke lives nearby and was initially worried his house would be threatened, but it didn’t take long to notice the winds were blowing the opposite direction. “I did make a call to check, though” he said.

About five years ago, Duke’s neighborhood was evacuated during a hillside fire emergency. “…the authorities were pounding on the door and my girlfriend was trying to grab the cat and go. The cat, though, was not compliant.” So she grabbed a pillowcase, threw the cat in, and jumped into the car. “It’s kind of a funny story now,” Duke concludes.

When asked if he was worried about the fire’s proximity, Ron shook his head no. “I used to live at the base of that hill 6 years ago. Conditions in the area are ripe. It’s a reminder to be prepared. Fire is part of the ecology and learning to live with it and having contingency plans is essential.” Ron went on to describe priority boxes or even fire wells to store information below ground.

“It’s about what’s important. We’d shut down the server and grab the basic computer units. If we had more time we’d take the [insect] cages with all the mother cultures. We could take a few trays of [fly] pupae, but if we didn’t get back in three days we’d have a fly problem,” Ron laughs.

In the end, the fire burned approximately 5 acres, accrued no property damage and the unnamed hill stands with a black eye to the north. If there was any common thread felt here at the insectary, it was the realization of choice and priority. Insects may be small, but not everything can fit in a pillowcase.

For more info, check out the Ventura County Star article.

*Second Image: Kyra snapped this with her cell phone on the way home.