Forlorn, I stand in the garden on a warm summer morning. Flowers–of three different beans, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and corn–are open and ready for business. Or buzziness, I might say. Except in our garden this week, there’s no buzz.
I even planted buckwheat for its white flowers to lure pollinators. It isn’t working.
And doggone it, the only consistent drone of wings I heard as the sun rose over the ridge and warmed my back were the always-frantic yellow jacket wasps zipping and zinging in all directions, including down invisible among the large leaves of the hubbard squash. I don’t know if they were involved in helping the squash bees with the job of spreading pollen (my guess is NOT) but they were doing SOMETHING there in the garden.
Even pesky yellow jackets serve some ecological service, I grudgingly admit as I follow their flight into and out of a hole on the bank just the other side of the garden fence. My first inclination was to spray them; my second was to leave them alone and let them do whatever it is they are destined to do in this world. For now, at least.
But what I’d rather have than yellow jackets are honey bees. European honey bees–a beleaguered species whose long term fate remains in precarious balance against our ignorance, our corporate agriculture and our tendency to replace forest and meadow with shopping malls or interstates, and to poison weed or wasp on a whim.
We’ve paved paradise. Where in this entire valley, save for the basswoods now blooming, does a honey bee go to find flowers except a garden like ours? And the most I’ve seen at any one time is two. Thank goodness for the roadside bloomeries, probably one of the best sources of flower blooms in Floyd County.
So when there were many dozens of honeybees in the Zion church meadow, yes, I was thrilled.
This one, you see, is about ready to go back to the hive (I thought about trying to follow, but it could be a mile or more away). His tibial depression called a “pollen basket” or corbicula is filled with the pollen groomed from its hairy body, pressed together in an aerodynamic ball.
But in serving its own purpose of feeding the hive, pollen grains (and the sperm nucleus each tiny sculpted grain contains) was carried by this bee from flower to flower (of the same species) to find the sticky stigma of the female flower parts.
From there, it will eat a tube (sometimes several inches–think about corn silks which serve this purpose) until it finds and fertilizes an egg. And a fertile seed is born, as often as not, inside a protective shell, this inside a sweet or otherwise attractive package we call a fruit or vegetable. What a neat system–except it’s not working so well anymore.
We need the honeybee, folks. Colony Collapse is not just a tree-hugger’s silly worry. We should all be concerned. And plant the kinds of flowers and habitat that gives what’s left of the pollinators a fighting chance.
So what do you say? Put on your costumes, Bee Boys and Girls, and do the waggle dance. Dude.
I’ve not seen so many honeybees in a long while as the number I found on the tall white lilies behind Zion Lutheran–a plant that until I took a closer look at it just now, I’d identified in error as Fly Poison. (Link is to Google Images of that plant for comparison to the image above.)
It isn’t, I now admit to my systematic botanical horror. And with the wife still asleep and me leaving for work soon, I can’t sneak upstairs and find my Newcombs Field Guide to steer me back in the direction of a correct ID.
So take a look at the larger version of this shot (with the bee hovering in the middle) and if anybody knows what this plant is, I’m ready to be humbled. I think I know it, but can’t retrieve a name. Flowers are a bit like a meadow rue, but everything else is wrong. I can’t remember what the leaf looks like, but I don’t think there were basal like Fly Poison.
For scale, the tallest plants of pure white flowers stand taller than my head (> 6 feet).
UPDATE: The big DUH: the flower is Black Cohosh. Common. Familiar. Forgotten. Early botanical dementia. So sad.
When the trees were first cut behind the Oak Grove Pavillion, it was disturbing–so much light where there had always been dense forest shade. I think I heard the pines were cut because of Southern Pine Beetle damage, the lot just behind Blue Mountain School, and you wouldn’t want dead treetops turning into widow-makers. Or whatever the term would be for a bereaved parent of a tree-toppled toddler.
But last week as we waited to hear Windfall perform at Oak Grove as part of the regular Saturday night music events there, my attention was drawn to the clearing, now into its second year. It has become a verdant field of richly diverse early successional sun-loving species whose seeds, now able to obtain warmth, light and freedom of overstory competition, have sprouted and grown into a new kind of nature: a natural meadow not seen for however many years the pines had dropped needles on the forest floor.
By the time my return trip from town carried me intentionally past this new meadow with my camera, it was early afternoon. While the morning had been perfect for this kind of photography, by the time I reached the site, the sun had burned off the early clouds, and worse, there was now a gentle breeze–good on the one hand because the temperature was over 80, but bad in the sense that many of the plants I’d want closeups of were of the tall and spindly variety, and the least wind set them swaying in and out of focus.
In this not so interesting overview shot, the dominant plant is our old friend, Mountain Toilet Paper, Common Mullein, or we had a new anatomical name, remember, and you can see the erect spikes here in abundance, see image left. The red stems are of Pokeberry, and the white spikes in the background I’ll be showing in detail–Fly Poison, Amianthium muscitoxicum, a tall lily of rich open forest.
So, that in the way of explaining the WHERE of a half dozen bug-and-blossom shots I’ll show you this week. And I hope to go back to the spot every couple of weeks throughout the summer and fall and see what species achieve “aspect dominance” as the earlier bloomers die back, and things like the fall asters now only inconspicuously in leaf begin to strut their stuff.
Tsuga, the Yellow Lab, was holding his mouth funny–as if he were about to say something in the way of an explanation, lips not quite together and a little guilty looking.
“What do you have? DROP IT!”
And out popped a spit-covered, perfectly intact inch wide new-hatched Eastern Box Turtle. I think it is the smallest I’ve ever seen.
The dog finds adult Terrapene carolina commonly and at one time in his puppyhood considered them a kind of crunchy delicacy. We scolded him and made him feel guilty of turtle mutiliation, so now he finds the full-grown turtles, he just carries them around in his gaping mouth for a while, then brings them over to us, lowers his head, and gently places them on the ground.
We relocate them while the dog can’t see. He almost always finds them AGAIN. We hide them AGAIN. He finds them AGAIN. You get the picture.
Summertime: watching the grass grow (not to mention the weeds in the garden) while swatting “bugs” that circle your head like Tye Fighters around the Death Star.
But wait before you get out the Hot Shot for Flying Insects. Ever think about watching to see what it is those creatures are all about? Most could care less about finding the whites of your eyes or dive-bombing into your ears while you are hot and sweaty (gnats, some hovering flies, midges and mosquitoes notwithstanding.)
Take for instance those blue-black wasps you see around the house this time of year. They’re out there making the world safer for you spider-haters.
Here’s a sampling of anesthetized spiders from just a couple of the mud tubes where the mud-dauber houses the spider meals for its young. These spiders are alive, but quite sedated. You can hold them in your hand. Go on. You know you want to.
Elsewhere in the yard and garden, I noticed some bumblebees strangely curious about a certain patch of leaves on the flowering quince. Their surfaces were glossy and looked as if they would be sticky–maybe the droppings of smaller insects living under the leaves. I wondered, having read this BBC piece about bumblebees resorting to getting sugars from aphid secretions because they are not able to find the usual flowers to forage.
Nature is adaptable, up to a point. Bumblebees can change their feeding behavior in an emergency. It will get them by for a few weeks, but in the long run, some or all may not make it. You’ve heard of Colony Collapse Disorder in the honeybee. The wild bumblebees in the UK and possibly elsewhere are likewise at risk.
So paying attention to insect behavior may be a worthwhile passtime. As their world changes, so goes our own.
…summertime, and the living is….not terribly picturesque. I tend to take fewer pix in summer than any other season, with the exception of close-ups of insects and garden critters and veggies. So, here ya go…
This, for you city types, is a potato flower. Country types will recognise its similarity to the tomato flower, a sound alike name, a close flower family relative among the Solanaceae.
Lamenting the lack of pollinators in the garden, that will not keep these plants from producing, as it is their roots and not their fruits we eat. For plants in which the fruit is the edible part, of course, if the embryo inside each seed doesn’t get spermed (boy meets girl, pollen nucleus finds egg nucleus) then the embryo’s womb as it were–the flesh of the apple or “meat” of a squash, may not grow very much, and even if it does, there won’t be any sexually derived genetic variety for the next generation. But that is just so much agro-biology.
I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed potato flowers going to fruit, but we have them out in the garden now–half-inch round orbs (coincidentally, very tomato like) that resulted from potato flowers “going to seed”. I’d thot I’d have take a picture of a cross sectioned potato fruit for a small insert here, but I got lazy AND rained out yesterday. I may yet become so at a loss for subject matter that I show you the inner anatomy of a potato fruit, as it is summertime and the photography is not easy.
Another not-fav veggie besides broccoli that is now taking over what little garden space we have inside the “compound” is the trailing vines of the aforementioned butternut squash. Too little bang for the buck, as far as I’m concerned, a single vine requires far more garden square-footage for a pound of produce compared to just about anything else of a more vertical persuasion–like corn or even beans.
But the hard Caucasian-colored goard-shaped lumps are highly prized by one of the gardeners who Must Be Obeyed. They make great tasteless custard for making pies, She says. Just add cinnamon and it tastes like, er, cinnamon!
Far as I’m concerned, the only redeeming quality of this plant is the large, fluted photogenic flowers, seen here at a bug’s-eye view. Click image for a larger version that gives a different flower, different view.
I may print this one up and follow through with my pledge to start getting some of my shots framed and on the wall, maybe even to some local galleries. Nah. I’ll just talk about it.
All these years here I had not bothered to name the tenants of these familiar distinctive webs but to call them “double decker” spiders, known far more by their product than their presence. They disappear as the camera lens gets close enough for a portrait of the landlord.
Somebody I was hiking with once called them “bunk bed” spider webs, and I kind of liked that, but was not able to run down the actual spider using that creative common name.
These webs obviously belong to the “sheet web” spider group (versus the spoke-line webs that are more familiar). And it turns out, the common name that is widely accepted for this particular sheet spider is the “bowl and doily” spider.
See it: the denser upper web is the rounded bowl sitting in the spider’s parlor on a lace doily. It is between these two webs that the spider’s hapless meals intrude before being had over for dinner.
These webs are rarely photogenic, being often under trees and horizontally situated. They catch every tiny fragment of detritus shed by the overstory and soon–even without the morning dew here–become quite visible with their burden of plant bits.
You know you’re in the country when you find pictures of over-sized vegetables on the front page of the weekly paper.
So here’s my entry: the world’s (or at least our subdivision of Greater Goose Creek’s) largest mullein plant. It grows now in the middle of what has been for the past several years (and prior to the Fortress Stockade) the Deer Salad Park (a.k.a. our garden) where there must still be some residual nutrients remaining. This specimen stands 7 feet tall and is just now starting to put out flowers on its central stalk, an erect sessile spike inflorescence that has earned it a new name.
Older common names include “rabbit tobacco”, and in our family because of its soft leaves it goes by either “baby bunny ears” or “mountain toilet paper.” However, from some recent DC-area visitor-friends out here, we learned that in some circles this plant in its full tumescence is known as the “penis plant”. (Now watch my google hits take a shift for the worse!)
And who can tell me where the image caption comes from? Anyone? Anyone?
Nothing tastes better than fruits or veggies warm from the sun, soft and ripe out of the garden of a morning–the transfusion immediate from Earth to Man. Pluck and eat, the cycle complete.
I feel the same way about a certain kind of photo-moment, and just had one of them. Not only that, but had the opportunity to confess this “fresh-eaten images” feeling with someone the other day over coffee. Amazingly, he seemed to understand.
So HM, this morsel is for you, not a half hour old as the sun rises over our un-mowed pasture–not so good for hay but wonderful for spider web pix.
Which reminds me of a little piece from Slow Road Home, and I’ll take the liberty to plegarize from the author as I’m certain he would approve:
I’ve been asked more than once what it might be we plan to do with ‘all this land’. The question is often asked by those who think, because we are ‘from off’ that we might not know how to use land wisely.
I have an idea of the answers that they expect. I could tell them that someday we will fence it off to keep a few head of cattle; or I could say that we were going to plant Christmas trees like so many other landowners in the county who can’t make their land pay for itself by farming alone.
The truth of the matter I’m not certain yet what we might do with this bit of pasture. But I believe that, until we decide, when they ask I will tell them this: I plan to use this bottomland for taking spider web pictures.
