A fascinating Silk Moth (Antheraea Polyphemus)

A couple of days ago, I spotted a very large moth in the hoophouse. It was apparently nocturnal, and seemed to be sleeping. When I went out a little later to photograph it, I found it resting on the side of the hoophouse, with its wings spread and the light shining through them. This made for a very good opportunity for pictures since I had all the time I needed, and… mostly enough light.

antheraea polyphemus moth?
The moth in the hoophouse. I think it may be an antheraea polyphemus moth, or at least something closely related. It doesn’t seem to even have a common name (at least, I haven’t found one, it seems to just be referred to as ‘polyphemus moth’) but the subfamily it is in has a common name: silk moth.

I returned at dusk to make sure it was able to find its way out of the hoophouse, and it became even more clear that it was nocturnal.

antheraea polyphemus moth?
A close up of one of the markings on the wing
antheraea polyphemus moth?
Close up of another marking on the wing. This one seems to be an actual gap in the scales on the wing; just a clear membrane with light shining through it.
antheraea polyphemus moth?
The moth’s face and antennae.
antheraea polyphemus moth?
Close up of the tip of the wing
antheraea polyphemus moth?
Close up of one of the antennae.
antheraea polyphemus moth?
Close up of another wing marking. This one is partially covered by the upper wing, but it has another of those gaps in the scales in the center of it (which I saw from the other side of the wing when the moth was in a different position).
antheraea polyphemus moth?
Extreme close up of the scales on the tip of the wing

A Sweat Bee on my Finger

I caught this tiny little sweat bee trying to find her way out of our hoophouse. She had obviously been foraging on something, probably thistle, judging by all the white pollen she had acquired around her back legs. Sweat bee is a common name given to a family of bees that like to lick sweat for the minerals it contains. This particular type of sweat bee is the smallest bee I see around here. As small as they are, female sweat bees can still sting a human, but they reserve this ability for when they are in immediate danger of being crushed to death. And yet, they are one of the more likely bees to be stung by simply because they are tiny and have a habit of landing on people, who may not notice they’re there. Fortunately, their venom is extremely mild (maybe just because there’s so little of it); for me, the effects last less than five minutes.

sweat bee with pollen
Sweat bee with pollen on my fingertip

After I had carried her out of the hoophouse, this little bee let me take some pictures of her before she flew off. She even seemed a bit curious about my camera, crawling too close to the lens to focus on, and landing briefly on the camera as she flew away.

sweat bee with pollen
Sweat bee with pollen on my fingertip. (Close up of the pollen.) She will use the pollen to provision her nest for her larvae.
sweat bee with pollen
Sweat bee with pollen on my fingertip, taking an interest in the camera.

St John’s Wort and the Bees

In our ‘meadow’ area, back by the woods, there are a couple species of St John’s wort growing; the common St John’s wort, and the larger Kalm’s St John’s wort. The Kalm’s St John’s wort is large enough to be called a shrub, and has been covered with bees foraging on its flowers.

Kalm's St John's wort (hypericum kalmianum)
Kalm’s St John’s wort
Common St John's wort (hypericum perforatum)
Common St John’s wort
Bumble bee with pollen, Kalm's St John's wort (hypericum kalmianum)
Bumble bee with pollen, Kalm’s St John’s wort
Honey bee with pollen on Kalm's St John's wort (hypericum kalmianum)
Honey bee with pollen on Kalm’s St John’s wort
Hover fly on Kalm's St John's wort (hypericum kalmianum)
Hover fly on Kalm’s St John’s wort
Bumble bee with pollen, Kalm's St John's wort (hypericum kalmianum)
Bumble bee with pollen, Kalm’s St John’s wort

Sights from the Bee Hives

I recently got a couple new colonies of honey bees. These were nucleus colonies, which are just tiny honey bee colonies in small (and more portable) boxes. They rapidly outgrow such small boxes, so moving them into new boxes (and looking them over and taking photos while I was at it) was my first task. Here’s a bit of what I encountered.

honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae
Honey bee eggs (mostly on the left) and just hatched larvae. The liquid around the larvae is their food; probably royal jelly. (All larvae are fed royal jelly until they are three days old, after three days, only queens are fed royal jelly.)

The black background to these photos is foundation, a template that the bees construct their comb on inside the hive. Foundation is a sheet of wax, or plastic (or wax coated plastic) printed with a hexagon pattern that the bees draw out into comb. In this case it is black plastic, which is often helpful for beginners to be able to see the bee eggs and young larvae, which is useful in assessing the health of the colony. (You actually literally have to train your eyes to see them; I had good eyesight and knew what I was looking for when I started, but I simply wasn’t able to see them through my veil so I would take it off temporarily. Now I can see them just fine through my veil.)

honey bee eggs and young larvae, with two eggs in one cell
Honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae. One cell contains two eggs. Very young queens sometimes do this when they are still learning how to lay eggs properly.
honey bees on comb
Close up of a few bees on the comb. The light in this picture highlights their fur (they even have fur on their eyes). Young bees are especially fuzzy.
honey bees with eggs and just hatched larvae
Honey bees with eggs (mostly on the left again) and just hatched larvae.
worker honey bees with queen
Worker honey bees surrounding their queen. This queen is marked with a white dot on her back (this is also something that can be helpful for beginners to be able to spot the queen among the thousands of worker bees, but it can also be helpful for people who have a lot of hives, or are breeding queens and need to keep track of them more carefully).

Back Door Bees

Leafcutter bee (megachile sp) and bumble bee (bombus sp) with pollen on thistle
Leafcutter bee (megachile sp) and bumble bee (bombus sp) with pollen on thistle

There are at least three different species of wild bees that nest within a few feet of my back door. Most people never notice that they’re there. Most wild bees are solitary, meaning that they don’t live in colonies. Instead, the female bees build nests and provision them with nectar and pollen and lay an egg or eggs in them. Two of the three outside my back door are solitary, but one is social, meaning that they do live in a colony and even they are very discreet.

Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata)

Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata)
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) drying off on a leaf after a rain shower

The first bees I noticed nesting outside the back door were two-spotted bees, or melissodes bimaculata, as I usually think of them. (I didn’t learn the common name when I first identified them, and I assumed they probably didn’t have one since most common names for bees don’t refer to a single species; they refer to a group of related species. A year or two later, I came across the common name.) These bees have been nesting in the vicinity of the back door since we moved here, which means they’ve probably been there longer than that. Two-spotted bees are solitary bees that nest in the ground and emerge late in the year (I have not even seen any of them yet this year).  They usually start to appear at about the time our lemon balm starts to flower, and I frequently see them foraging on it. They are named for the two rectangular spots on the back of the abdomen of the females (bimaculata also means two spotted).

Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) with pollen on lemon balm flower
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) with pollen on lemon balm flower
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) on lemon balm
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) resting on lemon balm flower. You can see one of her two spots in this picture.

Leafcutter bee (megachile sp)

leaf cutter bee (megachile species) cutting maple leaf
Leaf cutter bee (megachile sp) cutting maple leaf

The next bees I noticed were the leafcutter bees. They are not nearly as consistent about nesting in the same spot every year, but there was at least one nest three years ago, and several nests this year that I’ve observed. They’ve certainly been around other years, but I wasn’t able to spot exactly where they were nesting. Leafcutter bees are also solitary, and they build their nests out of pieces of leaves that they collect. They roll the leaves up into a tube, and divide the tube into sections that each will contain one egg and its food provisions. I enjoy watching them forage since they and the other bees in their family are the only bees to store the pollen they’ve collected on the underside of their abdomen, often causing them to hold it up high so that the pollen they’ve collected doesn’t get brushed off.

Leafcutter bee (megachile species) on oregano
Female leafcutter bees have large jaws for clipping leaves, which they use to build their nests

Bumble bee (bombus sp)

bumble bee (bombus sp) with pollen hanging from comfry flower
Bumble bee with pollen, hanging from comfry flower

The third bees to make their nest right outside my door are the bumble bees.  These are social bees, and there is one colony living at the edge of the lemon balm patch. They live underground and there is no obvious hole leading to their nest, so they are basically invisible… much like the other bees in this list. I think I was expecting them to be slightly more noticeable since they are social, and honey bees and yellow jackets (a social, sometimes ground nesting wasp) are both fairly noticeable. Both have a steady stream of traffic at their entrance and the yellow jackets do have a noticeable hole when they nest in the ground. But the bumble bees have one or two bees coming and going every few minutes and nothing to see to indicate they’re there otherwise.

Bumble bee (bombus sp) on blue vervain
Bumble bee peeking out from behind blue vervain

Bumble bees spend the warm months of the year living as a colony, and in the fall they raise a new batch of queens which hibernate over winter and start new colonies in the spring. The old queen and colonies don’t overwinter. Because of this, the colonies are in different locations each year.

Bumble bee (bombus sp) on tomato flower
Tomatoes are tricky plants to pollinate, but bumble bees have mastered the technique by vibrating their wings at the exact frequency to cause the flower to release its pollen. You can often hear them doing it if you watch them forage.

Snapshot of an Alder

Alders are a water loving, nitrogen fixing tree or shrub (depending on the exact species and growing conditions). We planted ours in 2015, and we already knew that the water loving part was important. Now, after the  floods they’ve been through, the alders are looking beautiful.

Alder branches with leaves, cones and catkins
Alder leaves, cones and catkins
Alder cones
Young alder cones
Alder male catkin
Alder catkin
Alder cones
alder cones
Alder leaves, cones and catkins covered in ice from freezing rain
Alder leaves, cones and catkins covered in ice from freezing rain
Alder cones
Young alder cones
Alder branches with leaves
Alder branches

Spring Flooding (part 2)

As I was wading around our land taking pictures of the flooding, I started to notice a lot of little creatures taking refuge from all the water…

Ants, a jumping spider and a snail
Some ants, a jumping spider, and a snail on a blade of grass
Caterpillar
wet caterpillar
Garter snake
Garter snake up on our wood pile, out of the water
Pillbugs and sowbugs
In this clump of grass sticking out of the water, there were hundreds of pillbugs and sowbugs clustered there to escape the flood. Pillbugs and sowbugs are crustaceans (like crayfish and lobsters). They are the only crustacean families that have adapted to live on land… making it a bit ironic to see them all fleeing the flood.
Jumping spider
Jumping spider clinging to some grass
Pillbugs
A couple of pillbugs on a blade of grass
Rove beetle and another insect
A rove beetle and another insect (I’m not sure what at this angle)
Caterpillar
caterpillar
Pillbugs and sowbugs
When I took this picture, I thought I was just photographing some pillbugs on a floating stick, but looking at my pictures, I realized there is an insect hiding in this photo. Can you spot it?
Rove beetles, other beetles
A variety of small creatures on a dried stalk of grass
A couple of rove beetles and a pillbug
A couple of rove beetles and a pillbug
Pillbugs, sowbugs and a millipede
This is another case of my noticing something after the fact… I did not see the millipede when I was taking this photo!
Spider standing on water
Spiders are the show offs, as they can run around on the surface of the water. They look like they are running on a super slippery surface, and they probably prefer having something solid to stand on.
Ants and beetle
Three ants and a beetle
Cluster of ants
A clump of ants clinging to a twig
Ants, a couple pillbugs, and a firefly
Ants, a couple pillbugs, and a firefly
A rove beetle and an ant
A rove beetle and an ant.
Spider
Spider holding onto some dried grass
Pillbugs
Some pillbugs on a dried grass stem (and an ant)
Rove beetle
Another rove beetle

Spring Floods (part 1)

standing water in the field in 2017
inundated autumn olives in the meadow
Water covering the field.

I have been aware for some time that it usually floods a bit in the spring, particularly in the field, and meadow areas, but this year, we had our biggest flood yet. Never before did we have any real flooding in the hoophouse (besides a puddle at the door), and we don’t usually have flooding in the fire circle or right up to the front yard chicken coop either.

Flooding around the hoophouse
Flooding inside the hoophouse. The floating wood chips make it difficult to guage the depth.
Autumn olive and an old log in water in the meadow

It occurred to me that I had thought the same thing about the flooding we had last year; it was the most flooding we’d had yet. It hadn’t been as surprising; it happened as everything began to thaw for spring, and we had just had a major snowfall, and the snow was about as high as I’d ever seen it. Then, as it all melted, it rained. It didn’t seem surprising, then, when the water crept up all around the hoophouse (but didn’t quite go in), and flooded all of the field and meadow, and parts of the back chicken yard, and even a little of the front chicken yard. It wasn’t surprising, but it did seem like a fluke. It seemed like a particularly wet year, and not something likely to happen again right away.

Autumn olives in the rain. This year’s flood appeared after an all night thunderstorm.
watery reflections of plants in our field
The back of the big chicken yard and the front of the meadow area.

The year before that had been the wettest I had yet seen it as well, I seemed to recall. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like there had been a lot of ‘wettest spring yet’ years, and we haven’t been here for that many years. I took pictures of the water each time I thought it was the wettest it had ever been (and pretty much any time anything unusual happens) so I was able to look at my pictures to see if I was remembering right. As it turns out, the trend is pretty clear; it has generally been getting wetter each spring we’ve been here. We usually have the most water in March, but last year’s big flood was in February and this year’s was at the beginning of May.

Dandelion flower at the edge of the flood, floating on the surface of the water
Hoophouse chickens hanging out on the roof of their coop to dry off.
This wild plum tree has been flooded multiple times.

In 2014 there were some large puddles of snowmelt in the field and one at the edge of the meadow that seemed impressive at the time. The next year was similar, but there was water at the edge of our field that was a bit more than I had noticed before… we had a wet summer that year too. 2016 was the first time the creek overflowed to mingle with the water pooled in the field and meadow, and there were big puddles in the back chicken yard too. In 2017 almost the entire field flooded with the exception of a small island where the telephone pole was, and the edges where we put our hoophouse, fire circle, and front chicken yard. In 2018, we had quite deep water covering the field, meadow, and a good portion of the back chicken yard, and it surrounded the hoophouse. It was also encroaching on the front chicken yard. And this year, not only did the hoophouse flood, but the water in the field was so deep that it was almost knee high in places.

The wild plum in last year’s flood.
The wild plum tree starting to flower, taking all the water in stride.
The area between the hoophouse and the chicken yard

Ironically, we have also had issues with the land getting too dry over the summer in more recent years. It might flood in the spring, and then almost not rain again until fall. Water is an important resource and getting so much of it in the spring wouldn’t be a bad thing… if we could properly channel and store it. That, then, is our challenge.

White cedar trees at the edge of the meadow
Autumn olives and other shrubs in the meadow
White cedar trees and a currant at the edge of a meadow. All the plantings in this area have been through floods before.
Autumn olives in the meadow
Wood chip pile, and tree on a tiny island
Rippled reflections (from 2017)

Willow Catkins

People seem to notice the willow catkins when they are small and fuzzy, but this stage is essentially just a bud of a flower that has not yet opened. They are not quite what one thinks of when thinking of flowers; they don’t have petals, and they don’t look like they are trying to attract insects. But they are the part of the plant that produces its pollen and its seeds. Unlike many flowers, though, the pollen is produced on separate catkins on separate plants from the seed producing catkins.

The small fuzzy buds are generally more appreciated for their appearance, and they are pretty, but I actually find their later stages to be even more fun to photograph. There is a surprising amount of variety in the opened willow catkins (even of the same species of willow), and I took more than fifty photos of the opened catkins this spring; most of them seem distinctly different from each other. The catkins are very attractive to pollinators since there’s not a lot flowering yet, and the insects give even more variety to the pictures of the opened catkins.

It occurred to me, while taking pictures of insects on the seed producing (female) catkins, that if willows were wind pollinated, as most plants with catkins are, then the pollinators should have no interest in the female catkins. Since many pollinators eat pollen, as well as nectar, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see them on the male catkins only, but they were just as excited about the female catkins. It seemed that willows must actually be insect pollinated, and a little bit of research confirmed my guess.

The fuzzy unopened stage of the willow catkins
Unopened pussy willow catkins
Close up of the pussy willow catkins
Pussy willow catkins just starting to open
Another type of willow just starting to flower
Honey bee collecting pollen from willow catkins
Willow with female catkins
Fully opened pussy willow catkins
Flowering willow with female catkins
More fully opened willow catkins
Close up of willow catkin with pollen
Willow catkin opening at the tip
Close up of willow catkin with pollen
Flower fly on female catkin
Willow catkin just starting to open
Willow catkin mostly opened
Willow catkin mostly open (close up of pollen)
Pussy willow catkin just opening
Ant on willow catkin
Pussy willow catkin just starting to open

Miniature Wildflowers

When we first moved here, there were two tiny flowers that would bloom when the weather was beginning to warm, but before it really looked like spring. They were draba verna, and bittercress. It occurs to me now, that one of these is a common name, and the other is a scientific name, which strikes me as slightly inconsistent. It is how I usually refer to the plants, though. The common name of draba verna (whitlow grass) seems harder to remember and certainly seems less descriptive of a tiny, early flowering member of the mustard family. Bittercress is also a member of the mustard family, and seems very much like a miniature version of a garden cress that I grew in the hoophouse the winter before last. Both were extremely cold hardy, both tasted about the same to me, and they looked very similar except for size; the garden cress was much larger. The flowers look a little different too. The garden cress also doesn’t shoot its seeds at you if you brush up against a ripe seedpod. Before I identified the bittercress, I called it the ‘seedshooting mustard’.

Draba verna flowers
Draba verna flowers are only slightly larger than a poppy seed
Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) flowers
Bittercress flowers
Draba verna plant
Draba plant – this one is actually fairly large; sometimes the cluster of leaves at the base isn’t much larger than the clump of flowers
Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) plant
Bittercress plant
Speedwell flower
Speedwell flower; another extremely small wildflower that usually flowers a bit later than the bittercress and draba plants. This plant, though, is flowering a bit early.