Willowherb is a plant with a very small pink flower, that I’ve always looked at with mild curiosity, but it wasn’t until I noticed its seedpod that I decided to identify it (there’s always a variety of things to identify, vying for my attention). I’d not seen a seedpod quite like it before, although I’d seen plenty of other interesting seedpods. Both the flower and the seedpods of willowherb are small and all these photos are larger than life size. The seeds are probably about the size of poppy seeds and the flowers about the size of a lentil. I don’t know a whole lot about them yet, but they did finally manage to catch my attention!
Wild carrot flower (also known as queen anne’s lace)
A very common wildflower (or weed, depending on one’s perspective) in my area is a plant known as queen anne’s lace, but it is also called wild carrot, because it is the ancestor of the carrots most people are familiar with eating. It is actually even the same species as domestic carrot. Its presence in large number in the area is a clue that domestic carrots can grow well here (and I have found that to be true). But ironically, its presence also makes it almost impossible to save seeds from domestic carrots grown here, assuming you want the domestic carrots to stay domestic; they will cross with the wild carrots and eventually revert back to wild carrots themselves.
A thick patch of wild carrot by the woodsTachina fly on wild carrot
At this point in the year, the wild carrots that are in their second year of life are flowering (carrots are biennials, meaning that they live two years). The flowers are food for many pollinators, but I’ve noticed bumble bees seem to especially like them. Bumble bees race around the flowers while foraging on wild carrot, somehow gathering up pollen while on the run.
Mud dauber wasp on wild carrot.Honey bee foraging on wild carrot flower. Honey bees actually don’t seem to like wild carrot flowers all that much but they will forage on it when it is abundant and not much else is. Also, there tend to be a few bees in each colony that will do things differently from their sisters, like bringing home wild carrot pollen, while everyone else is bringing home oregano nectar (which is the case here; the nearby oregano was covered in bees, while this one lone bee foraged on the wild carrot).
In their first year, wild carrots produce a long taproot to store energy for overwintering. In their second year they flower, grow seeds, and die. Domestic carrots are pretty much the same, but with a slightly more exaggerated, and more colorful, taproot. (Wild carrots have white roots.)
Wild carrot seeds ripeningWild carrot flowerWild carrot flower from a different angle
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 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 on my fingertip. (Close up of the pollen.) She will use the pollen to provision her nest for her larvae.Sweat bee with pollen on my fingertip, taking an interest in the camera.
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 wortCommon St John’s wortBumble bee with pollen, Kalm’s St John’s wortHoney bee with pollen on Kalm’s St John’s wortHover fly on Kalm’s St John’s wortBumble bee with pollen, Kalm’s St John’s wort
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 (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 just hatched larvae. One cell contains two eggs. Very young queens sometimes do this when they are still learning how to lay eggs properly.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 (mostly on the left again) and just hatched larvae.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).
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) 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 flowerTwo-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 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.
Female leafcutter bees have large jaws for clipping leaves, which they use to build their nests
Bumble bee (bombus sp)
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 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.
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.
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 catkinsUnopened pussy willow catkinsClose up of the pussy willow catkinsPussy willow catkins just starting to openAnother type of willow just starting to flowerHoney bee collecting pollen from willow catkinsWillow with female catkinsFully opened pussy willow catkinsFlowering willow with female catkinsMore fully opened willow catkinsClose up of willow catkin with pollenWillow catkin opening at the tipClose up of willow catkin with pollenFlower fly on female catkinWillow catkin just starting to openWillow catkin mostly openedWillow catkin mostly open (close up of pollen)Pussy willow catkin just openingAnt on willow catkinPussy willow catkin just starting to open
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 are only slightly larger than a poppy seedBittercress flowersDraba plant – this one is actually fairly large; sometimes the cluster of leaves at the base isn’t much larger than the clump of flowersBittercress plantSpeedwell 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.
Today was a warm day; in the upper fifties, and the bees were flying. They seem to appreciate a chance to come out during the winter (even if it isn’t technically winter yet, it is for them now). They usually start coming out of their hives at around fifty degrees, but the wind, sun, clouds, and their own level of need all have an effect, so there is no exact temperature that draws them out. If it is a sunny, calm day and they’ve been cooped up for a long time, they may well come out if it is only just above freezing.
Honey bees gathered at a crack between hive boxes in February 2016.
A few days like this, scattered throughout the winter, are definitely beneficial for the bees. Bees are cleanly creatures, and they don’t poop inside their hives. Warm days allow them to leave and make ‘cleansing flights’ which is the term for the flights they make in winter solely to relieve themselves. Warmer days also allow them to clean out any bees that have died while they are in their winter cluster. There are always some bees dying in a normal honey bee colony, but in winter, they almost always die inside the hive, and then have to be removed.
Honey bees at the entrance to their hive in January 2016. The mesh at the entrance is sized so that bees can come and go freely, but mice cannot.
Too many warm days, though, can be a bit of a problem. The bees seem to want to take advantage of any days that are warm enough for flying, but if there aren’t any nectar or pollen sources, there isn’t much for them to do and flying every day can actually shorten their lifespans. The winter bees have to live longer than the summer bees since the colony takes a break, for a month or two, from raising new bees to replace them. Part of the reason the winter bees are able to live longer is that they fly less. Their wings, which wear out eventually, are one of the limits of their lifespans. Another problem is that if the weather is not cold, but still chilly, every bee that ventures out runs a risk of getting chilled and not being able to return. Chilled bees become sluggish, and eventually unable to move. They can be revived easily enough, simply by warming them up, but they usually wind up stuck somewhere where they can’t get warmed up. Sometimes I find a chilled bee somewhere, and breathe on her a bit to warm her up. (They don’t seem to like this; they usually slide their stingers out, but they can’t really do anything since they can’t move.) That usually warms her up just enough to start flexing her flight muscles and eventually revive herself.
I learned about most of this after noticing that my bees seemed to have more trouble with warm winters than cold ones. I knew they had issues with moisture during those winters, but I began to suspect that the warmth itself might have been a factor. This was what I found out when I researched it, but I still wonder if there may be something more to it. The bees that did survive one of those warm winters seemed to have a lot of mites (and the viral diseases associated with them) that following spring. Normally in spring, most of the mites have died off over winter, resetting things for the bees. Then, their numbers gradually increase over the year until winter once again resets their numbers. (Assuming, of course, that they don’t increase too fast, and kill the colony.) So, are warm winters not enough to reset the mite levels for the bees? I don’t have enough winters or colonies worth of experience to say for sure, only enough to notice a pattern that makes me suspicious. In any case, it is enough to make me take the precautions I would take if I knew that to be true.
My very active warré colony in February of 2016 – one of the warm winters
So far this winter, there have been some warm days, but it doesn’t seem to be an overabundance of them. It’s still early, though.
Back in the woods right now, the witch hazel plants have already shed their leaves for the winter. The plants would be bare now, except for all the flowers on them. Witch hazel is the only plant I know of that does this. The chrysanthemums and wild arugula are still flowering, but they still have leaves, and when they are done, they will die back to the roots for winter. I first noticed the witch hazel in the November after moving here. It was unexpected to see a flowering shrub in the mostly leafless, dormant woods like that, and it caught my attention. I was able to identify it easily and quickly; besides flowering at a very unusual time, its flowers were very unusual and distinctive looking. The only problem was that everything I had identified it by had to do with the flowers. Would I still be able to tell which one it was in the spring? I was curious to see what the leaves looked like, but I would have to wait several months without forgetting where it was. (These days I suppose I would probably just look something like that up, but at the time I wasn’t very experienced with that sort of thing.) I did notice that the tips of the twigs had a sort of zigzag shape where the leaves had been attached and I used that characteristic to identify several more of them in the middle of winter. By spring I still knew which plants were the witch hazels, and got to know what their leaves looked like. Later, when we planted hazelnut bushes, I realized where the ‘hazel’ part of the witch hazel’s name came from: the leaves of the hazelnuts looked almost identical.
The unusual flowering habits of witch hazels do bring up a question, though. What pollinates a plant that routinely flowers in November? Not surprisingly, I am not the first person to wonder about that. It is obviously an insect pollinated plant, but it blooms when there don’t seem to be insects around. And, as it turns out, its pollinator is also nocturnal, so you aren’t likely to see anything pollinating it. It is pollinated by an exceptionally cold hardy moth, which shivers to warm itself on the cold nights when it is active, similarly to the way that honey bees keep each other warm in the winter. Here is a link to an article that explains more about that: https://www.venerabletrees.org/winter-sex-witchhazel/
