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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
I recently figured out how to use the ‘manual focus’ mode on my camera, which has been handy for making good use of my macro lens. Here are some of the little things I found to photograph.
Yesterday morning, a red winged blackbird was spotted out the kitchen window. He was perched in a cottonwood tree, apparently alone. But red winged blackbirds don’t arrive alone in the spring, and it wasn’t long before we heard the calls of the rest of his flock.
When I lived in Florida, the red winged blackbirds spent the winter hanging around our pond (and other such areas), and now, in Michigan, they nest around the marshy areas in our field. It would be hard not to notice when they arrive; they travel in large flocks, and sit in the treetops chattering loudly. This year, their arrival has coincided quite exactly with the arrival of warmer weather, which has been a bit sudden this year. They seem to have timed things nicely for themselves.
