Earlier this winter I spotted some interesting looking structures on an old dried lobelia plant. They were pretty tiny, so, as I frequently do, I brought out my macro lens to photograph them and get a better look.
The ‘interesting structures’ on the lobelia
They turned out to be the skeleton of the part of the plant that holds the seed capsules. I realized this when I managed to find one that was still holding on to a capsule.
Great lobelia with seed capsule.
In summer, great lobelia has distinctively shaped blueish-purple flowers. In winter it is very much just one more dried plant stem unless you look very closely!
There is a particular fallen tree in the woods that I visit frequently, because there is usually something interesting to see there. When it was still standing, I identified it as a wild cherry, and although I’ve seen others, this one was the largest.
The wild cherry tree when it was still standing
A while after the tree fell, I started to notice a lot of different mushrooms growing on it, and I started to make a habit of checking on it to see if there were any particularly photogenic mushrooms there while I was out taking pictures in the woods.
Super tiny mushroom with larger mushrooms in the background. This has become one of my favorite mushroom pictures.Turkey-tails, possibly.More mushrooms on the fallen tree
This spring while out in the woods taking pictures of the various wildflowers and trying to determine what kind of pollinators they were providing for, I noticed new interesting things happening with the downed cherry. At first I noticed the metallic green bees darting around the dark, scaly bark. Then I saw something green and shiny, but it wasn’t a bee…
A six-spotted tiger beetle (cicindela sexguttata)The only view the tiger beetles seemed willing to give me… After passing up the opportunity to take a picture like this several times in favor of a ‘better’ angle I eventually took one up on the offer they were repeatedly giving me. Then I decided I actually like this picture quite a bit……But I still think the side shots give a better view of the beetle as a whole.
Even though tiger beetles have a bit of a reputation for being hard to photograph, I found the little green sweat bees to be much more difficult, at least in the circumstances the fallen tree offered. They were attracted to the dead tree as a nesting site and I would see them darting around the wood, but almost anytime they landed, they would immediately disappear into the tiny holes in the wood that were the entrances to their nests.
This is the best picture I managed to get of one of the sweat bees
I’m sure there are more creatures than just the ones I noticed making use of the dead tree as habitat, and I’ll continue to notice more as I keep on visiting the tree.
A toad that was sheltering under the bark of the treeA seedling growing from a crack in the bark. I don’t know if this is a good place for this seedling to be growing, but I thought it was interesting.Springtails on a mushroomAnother mushroomTiger beetle posing on a dried mushroom
I spent a large portion of the warmest day of the year thus far trying to find a particular bee. The bee I was looking for (colletes, probably colletes inaequalis) was one that I’d seen regularly in the spring and was often one of the first bees I’d find, but last year, I didn’t see any. I wasn’t sure if it was because they weren’t around, or if I just wasn’t looking at the right times. I did eventually spot some, but for some reason, they seem more skittish than I remember them being. Also complicating matters, the willows I was searching for them on have grown a bit too tall for me to see all the catkins well, and I noticed a hover fly with strangely similar coloration to these bees all over the willow catkins, making it hard to tell at a glance if the little flash of silver and black I was seeing should be followed. Makes me wonder if the flies are mimicking the colletes bees, though… they certainly look like they could be, but these bees aren’t exactly intimidating, so why mimic them specifically?
Hover fly on willow catkinHover fly on willow catkinHover fly on willow catkinColletes bee I caught this year
In the end, I found that some of the bees were visiting the flowering winter crops in the hoophouse and I managed to catch a couple on their way out. The bee in the picture pretty much flew into my hand and I took the opportunity to hang on to him just long enough to get my camera ready.
And for one last look-alike, here is a mining bee (an andrena species) on a willow catkin.
For honey bee colonies that have made it through the winter, the month of March can still be a difficult and risky time. Especially towards the beginning of the month, there isn’t much of anything for them to forage on. Despite that hinderance, the bees are busily expanding their brood rearing operation. The colony’s growing new generation requires more resources than what the relatively small (and all fully grown) winter generation needed. If the colony was successful the previous season, this should be no problem; their stores of honey and pollen would be adequate for the job.
Honey bee grooming pollen off of her antennae, to be collected in her pollen baskets.
But in the case of my colonies, which were started late last year, and then faced a weirdly early start to winter, they were a bit short on pollen, which is especially important for their developing brood. The warmth of spring also came fairly early this year, and so there was plenty of time before anything was blooming outside for the bees to be out and about, looking for something to feed their brood.
Honey bee gathering pollen from Tokyo bekana flowers. Tokyo bekana is a very mild green in the mustard family that we grow during the winter.
Meanwhile in the hoophouse many of the winter crops were starting to bolt (produce their flowers), and the warmer temperatures meant that the louvres were open most of the time… So before long, the bees discovered it and were flying in through the louvres to gather pollen from the bolting winter crops. This would have been just fine, if they were able to find their way back out. Unfortunately, although they were very clever about navigating their way in, when they decide it is time to return to the hive, they tend to try to fly towards the sun, rather than retracing their path. I guess maybe they need to orient themselves for a while before they can pick out their route home? However it works, the result was that with just the louvres open, most of them couldn’t find their way out, and with the sides also opened up, some of them still found themselves stuck in the corners. (Bumble bees don’t have this problem… they seem to be extremely good navigators. They’ll fly into a corner occasionally, but usually after trying unsuccessfully to escape for a minute they just go off and try another way.)
Honey bees foraging on flowers from our winter crops
My response to this was to gather flowers from the bolting plants and arrange them in what I hoped would be a tempting display not too far from the hives (but also not too close, because that can lead to robbing, sometimes) and to catch bees that got in the hoophouse and brush them out of the corners.
Honey bees foraging on flowers from our winter crops
The bees seemed to appreciate having a nearby patch of flowers to forage on, but some of them would still start flying into the hoophouse on the warmest days. One day toward the end of March, I noticed very few bees getting into the hoophouse despite it being a warm sunny day, and there were fewer on the patch by the hives. Finally, something else was flowering for them… but what was it? I didn’t see them on the hazelnut catkins that were just starting to open. Hazelnuts are wind pollinated and offer only pollen, which they would have gone for if something wasn’t offering them a better deal. It turned out to be the silver maples back in the woods.
Silver maple flowersSilver maple flower (I don’t have pictures of the bees on the flowers because most of the flowers were way up above what I could reach, and I actually had to trek quite a ways just to find a tree with a low hanging branch with flowers I could photograph. The bees, meanwhile, probably don’t find it worth their while to come down there much when most of the flowers are up high.)
So now, as more things join the silver maples (willows are also starting to open their catkins now), the colonies will start to grow, and turn their attention toward their next season, which is the swarming season.
Silver maple flowerPollen dusted honey bee hanging from a willow catkin
Here are some tiny rove beetles I found the other day that push the limits of my current macro lens. In the first three pictures you can kind of see how the wings are folded up under the elytra (the shell-like covering of the wings of beetles, which rove beetles have considerably less of than most other beetles). In the last two pictures the wings are completely unfolded. I know the wings are pretty thin, but it is still impressive to me that they can just fold up their wings and put them away.
Rove beetle perched on what is probably a sparrow droppingRove beetle on the runGetting ready to open the elytraElytra open and wings spreadIridescent wings
It is getting very close to spring, both by the calendar and otherwise. But in the hoophouse, it is already spring. To be specific, I’d say it is around the beginning of April in there. The hoophouse is unheated, so it goes through seasonal temperature cycles just like the rest of the landscape, but it goes through somewhat different temperature cycles. It tends to warm up quicker during the day, especially if it is sunny (on sunny days the temperature difference can be extreme, but there are louvres that open automatically at a set temperature to moderate extremes). At night, though, it can get almost as cold as outside (but at least it is sheltered from wind and snow).
Purple dead-nettle in between spinach leaves
The fact that it isn’t just consistently a little bit warmer inside the hoophouse seems like it would make estimating the equivalent season difficult, if not impossible. But I realized, a couple years ago now, that I don’t have to figure it out; the weeds growing in the hoophouse had already done that. Because of my ‘photojournaling’ observations, I had pictures of when different plants flowered, or went to seed or fruited (or even just when they started coming up). So all I had to do was look at what the plants were doing, and see when they had been in the same stage outside in previous years.
A speedwell flower
At first, I wondered if the results would be consistent. Would all the individual observations, taken together, all point to the same time frame? Or would different plants handle the seemingly non-equivalent conditions in different ways? But it turned out they did all point to the same time frame. So, I figured, if the plants in the hoophouse were doing what they would do in March (for example), I could plant crops that would be planted outside in March in this area, and they should do well. That has seemed to work pretty well, and gave a method to follow for figuring out when to plant what in the spring even when we were new at growing in a hoophouse.
These are some pictures of snowflakes on my glove that I took the other day. They were big wet snowflakes, but there was one I found that was more normal sized.
This past Sunday was very warm for this time of year and I decided to check on my bees and see how they were doing. I wanted to see if it looked like they had enough honey left to make it until spring, and make sure that it would be accessible to them. Sometimes, as the cluster of bees makes its way slowly through their winter provisions, they find themselves with empty combs between themselves and the combs filled with honey. They can’t cross the barrier to get to the honey, because the cluster itself moves very slowly (especially when raising brood), and individual bees would quickly become immobilized by the cold.
This is the first time I have done a midwinter hive check, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The sun was shining, but it was windy, and the wind was chilly. I knew the bees wouldn’t like that, but it was only expected to get more windy as the day went on. (Since this needed to be a quick check since it was only marginal weather for beekeeping, all the photos in this post are courtesy of my mom.)
The first hive I opened was the colony that had had the most honey going into winter. The winter cluster looked (from what I could tell having never looked at a winter cluster in person before), pretty good. It seemed like a decent size; there were still plenty of bees left. They didn’t seem very happy about having the chilly wind suddenly blowing on them, though.
The winter cluster
I could see that they still had honey left, but it looked a little scattered, from what I could tell without really taking things apart. It also wasn’t something I could just rearrange to get the honey next to the bees. I did still have a couple of candy boards left over from last winter, though… I decided to go get those out to give to the bees, just in case.
The candy boards (and smoker). The candy boards are filled with hardened sugar, and have a mesh on the bottom that holds the sugar in place while being large enough for the bees to go through to eat the sugar.
That ended up being easier said than done; one of the candy boards was starting to come apart (I was pretty much improvising when I built them… the other one had turned out all right, though). Once I opened the hive for the second time, the bees really started coming out. Some of them seemed upset, and some of them just seemed confused, and cold. But they were all over the surface I needed to set the candy board on. Setting it down without crushing bees was going to be difficult. After I got it in place (I don’t think I crushed many bees, but it was kind of hard to tell this time) I noticed that there was a bit of a traffic jam at the entrance as all the bees that had flown out when I opened the hive tried to get back inside at once.
A traffic jam at the entrance. The entrance is reduced to a pretty small hole to keep mice out of the hive.
The second hive check went much smoother. At that point I was assuming I would have to put a candy board on for them, but they actually seemed a bit better situated than the others. I already had the candy board out and ready to go, though, so I put it on anyway.
Getting the candy board situated on the hive.
Now it has returned to cold and snowy, and the bees are back out of sight in their hives.
Maché is one of the most cold hardy salad greens one can grow. They didn’t get planted this year, but that didn’t stop them from coming up anyway, since some of the plants in the above photo (taken late January 2018) went to seed.
Maché flowering in the hoophouse, and getting ready to reseed itself.Young maché plantsMaché in the salad bowl. (Taken on November 23, 2017, this was probably one of our first maché harvests, and everything else in the salad was also from our hoophouse garden.)
The main reason the maché didn’t get planted this year was because we were all too busy trying to keep the rodents away from some of the earlier winter crops that had been planted. Here’s a look at a few of the more intentionally planted crops in the hoophouse right now:
MizunaEscaroleMibunaTokyo bekanaA romaine type lettuce variety called ‘winter density’Mibuna
It has finally started to look like winter around here, giving me a chance to practice my ice and snow photography. Quickly dropping temperatures seem to be necessary for some of the tiny ice crystals I look for and the conditions haven’t been right for seeing them until recently.
Frost crystal on an icy puddle in the fieldFrost crystal on an icy puddle in the fieldIce patterns on the creekFrost crystal on an icy puddle in the fieldIce along the edge of the creekFrost crystals on an icy puddle in the field
For a couple years now, I’ve been taking pictures of the sunlight reflecting off of the snow, but none of them have had the colors I notice in the snow while taking the pictures… after a bit of experimenting I noticed that the colors only show up when the snow is out of focus, so I intentionally blurred a few pictures to test it…
Out of focus snow
An out of focus picture with specks of color didn’t seem like a particularly good end to that line of experiments, though, so here’s what I came up with:
Water horehound and sparkling snowWater horehound and sparkling snowWater horehound and sparkling snowWater horehound and sparkling snow
