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Verlyn Klinkenborg has a good piece in The New York Times about what's left of the ecosystem and our "role" in caretaking, stewarding, and/or leaving it be. His thoughts on the nature of nature and the nature of our dumb ideas about nature are right on.

Here's an outtake, but I recommend the whole piece:

It is certainly possible to make wiser and wiser decisions about how to live, but what if the world we make our choices in becomes, in natural terms, steadily poorer and less diverse? More and more, we find ourselves choosing only among the consequences of regrettable choices we made before.

Humans are competent to do many things. But I do not think we are competent to run a global ecosystem. Something has been irretrievably lost by the time we begin to believe that we can manage nature for people. The essence of nature is that it is not “for people.”

My lack of faith in humans as global managers isn’t just a philosophical conclusion. It is based on the sorry, sorry evidence. The fact is that we have begun to run the global ecosystem already and are doing a terrible job of it.

To put it mildly....anyway, read the piece. Then go out there and so something about it.

A Disquieting Inflorescence

No, it's not a posthumously published Edward Gorey story, but a ubiquitous scoundrel of a plant named burdock. You may recall that in the recent Got Milkweed? post, we explored the risky nature of pollinating that flower—talk about unsafe sex!

Well, burdock puts milkweed to shame when it comes to pathological tendencies. Three years ago, an innocent looking burdock blossom savagely murdered a beautiful young hummingbird at the edge of my garden and earned my eternal wrath. Since then, I've done all I can to eradicate it with a scythe. It's great exercise!

It's also a Sisyphean undertaking. My bemused neighbors occasionally catch me in the act and shake their heads. "You'll never get rid of that stuff," they say, unaware that I've got a vendetta to fulfill and more than enough Italian in my blood to make good on it. However, as one who at least aspires to mental hygiene, I ritualistically transform the bitter herb of revenge into the sweet heirloom tomato of environmental correctness by building mountain-high compost piles out of the burdock's elephantine leaves and massive stems. Again—good exercise!

The irony is that burdock would be a great weed to have around if it didn't have such murderous tendencies. The roots are edible (I've had some wonderful Japanese preparations and I know it's popular in old-world Italian cooking). The flowers are a pretty purple. And come to find out, the honeybees and bumblebees really like it. So what's not to like?

The problem lies in the tiny, Velcro-like barbs that surround the base of the flower. (In fact, the man who invented Velcro reported having gotten the idea from observing these, or similar, plants.)

Although most pollinators seem to make their visits to the flowers without incident, plenty don't. Between the horrifying hummer incident and a bird skeleton I found stuck to the dried flowers one winter, I am so over this plant!
As if the above-mentioned incidents weren't enough, the other morning, I found a bat struggling to get free from a burdock flower. I ran home, threw on my beek suit and gloves, got my "surgical equipment" and freed it, but its wings had been torn and I believe it perished after I left it, still clinging upside-down to the burdock stem—one of the most forlorn sights I've come upon in a long time.
Afterwards, in the interest of further building my case against this pernicious plant, I conducted a brief census of a patch of burdock and found 2 stuck honeybees—one practically mummified, the other still alive but beyond assistance.
I assume the evolutionary excuse for this barbed structure is dispersal. The idea would be that the dried, seed-rich flower adheres (temporarily) to the leg of a deer, say, and is transported to another area, thereby extending its range. Just so we know it's not being mean for the hell of it.

The thing is, it's a pretty good-looking plant and it clearly appeals to the local pollinators. So let's for a moment simply enjoy these images of burdock at its best.
A bee's-eye view.

Inviting-looking pollen available to all who chose to provide pollination services herein—but watch those barbs!

An old girl (note tattered wings) with pollen-dusted head.

Coming in for a landing....

A lovely bumblebee virtually saturated in fairy dust.

The great chronicler of honeybee life, Maurice Maeterlinck, spoke eloquently of the sadness we often find alongside nature's beauty, abundance, and joy.

"...all things in nature are sad, when our eyes rest too closely upon them....At the present hour the duty before us is to seek out that which perhaps may be hiding, behind these sorrows; and, urged on by this endeavor, we must not turn our eyes away, but steadily, fixedly, watch these sorrows and study them, with a courage and interest as keen as though they were joys. It is right that before we judge nature, before we complain, we should at least ask every question that we can possibly ask."

Words to live by...with scythe firmly in hand.

Complete Metamorphosis—The Video

A quick primer on the honeybee lifecycle.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

This is a bona fide meander; I found this fabulous speech given in the late 1970s by sci fi hero Philip K. Dick and thought it was amazingly prescient and rich.

Sip

On hot days, it's fun to watch the honeybees collect water from the dewy grass. If you watch closely, you see them sip up droplet after droplet of dew—it's amazing to see how much they can carry.

This clever little honeybee comes repeatedly throughout the day to gather water from the Styrofoam self-watering seedling tray I keep on the deck. I guess she likes a slightly higher-tech setting for all this water-gathering business.
Speaking of tech, the bees use the water to cool the hive by fanning it with their wings. That's pretty much how an air-conditioner works. H. Sapiens aside, I can't think of any other animal beside the honeybee that has figured out how to air-condition its living quarters—sans electricity, no less. Rock on, smart little bee.

Top Five Reasons I Got Stung

1. The dead bee I picked up wasn’t dead.
2. I bothered the bees before a thunderstorm.
3. My swarm-catching technique could use some refining.
4. I inadvertently squished a bee while working in the hive.
5. I deigned to get too close to the queen.

The sting doesn’t hurt so much as it surprises. And then it itches. For days. To the point of insanity. The sting and its aftermath remind you to be gentle, careful, methodical, considerate, slow-going, and—always, always—respectful of the bees.

We've done it again....

Brought to you—or rather, taken from you—by that oxymoron, humankind.

Honeybees and Goldenrod

Last week, tightly clenched goldenrod buds appeared everywhere, suppressing their yellow but hinting at good things to come. I've been told that the nectar flow from goldenrod is one of the major honeybee forage sources in this area. Its appearance, like the blue jays calling, is also a signal that here in the Northern Catskills, summer has shifted into low gear for the steep decline toward autumn.
Two days ago, the goldenrod started really showing its stuff. And today, of course, the honeybees were on the case. This girl is plunging her proboscis into the flower's nectaries, and has packed a modest amount of goldenrod pollen on her pollen basket (located on her hind leg—a.k.a. the bee's knee).As this honeybee travels from one goldenrod blossom to another, she'll continue mixing pollen with saliva and then packing it into the basket. (Unlike other bees and pollinators, a honeybee will continue working the same type of flower, continuously, with different individuals working "monogamously" on various types of flowers at any given time. This week, along with the goldenrod, the bees seem to be mainly working the thistle, knapweed, and burdock.)

This honeybee has packed her pollen basket nice and full.
Here's a closeup of the pollen basket filled with a load of protein-rich pollen to fortify and sustain the hive.

A Tour of the Hive

Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to the bee yard to confirm that the (previously) virgin queens had mated and were laying "the next generation" in Hive Orange and Green Hive, both of which swarmed on June 21, taking with them the old queens and leaving newly raised, virgin queens behind. I was pleased to find plenty of evidence that all was well, reproduction-wise, in both hives. Here's a quick tour of what I found. (Click the photos to view them in a larger format.)

In these two combs, you see just what a beekeeper hopes to find: plenty of capped worker brood—the cells covered by the tan-colored, porous-looking caps in the middle of the comb. Notice that these capped cells form a nice pattern filling in the majority of cells in the the comb. This is suggestive of a good queen who has laid each of her eggs in a efficient pattern along the comb. Bordering the top of the comb, the bees store nectar (note the pale or yellowish uncapped cells) and capped honey (whitish caps).

Below that are some dark, uncapped cells in which pollen is being stored. Both food sources—honey for carbs, pollen for protein—are conveniently located above the brood cells to make it easier for the nurse bees to mix "bee bread" (pollen + nectar/honey) to feed the larvae numerous times a day over a period of several days. During this time, the larvae grow at a rapid rate. Once they are ready to morph into the winged creature we know as the honeybee, the cell is capped and the magical rearrangement of the bee's molecular biology begins.

Here you see larvae being fed and attended to by nurse bees. You also see some capped cells inside of which are larvae undergoing metamorphosis.

Once the bees have built out enough combs for a nice, big broodnest, they start building honeycombs—combs with larger cells for storing honey and pollen that will be used during times of dearth and, of course, during wintertime when nothing's blooming and it's too cold for the bees to fly. The dark cells in this lovely bee-composition contain pollen. Along the top and upper-middle right is capped honey. There are also some as-yet empty cells and cells containing uncapped nectar.

After the bees bring nectar into the hive and deposit it in the cells, it takes some time (and effort on the bees' part—mainly through the fanning of their wings) to reduce the moisture level to the point where it becomes honey. Once it does, the bees cap the cell with wax, keeping the precious substance clean and protected for future use. As William Longgood observes in his great book The Queen Must Die, "To the bee, honey is the ultimate reality."

Here's a closeup of the pollen, capped honey, and open cells. By the way, the pollen colors vary enormously as different plants come into bloom and are visited by the bees. I can't be sure, but I suspect this pollen is from white clover.

When I look at a closeup like this—and every time I visit the hive and watch how hard the bees are working—I can't help but think about how many dozens of trips by dozens of bees it takes to fill a single cell with honey or pollen. Truly, every teaspoon of honey and every grain of pollen represents a herculean effort on the part of the honeybees.
And that's leaving aside the genius of the comb itself...

Nature is an Art Gallery

Here's why I never miss going to galleries or museums when I'm in the middle of nowhere: the compositions of nature, the element of surprise, the arresting abstractions, the perfectamundo of it all....

honeybees = "the soul of summer"

Thumbing through Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee tonight, I came upon this lovely bit of unabashedly enthused nature prose, and thought I'd share.

"The bees give their honey and sweet-smelling wax to the man who attends them; but more precious gift still is their summoning him to the gladness of June, to the joy of the beautiful months; for events in which bees take part happen only when skies are pure, at the winsome hours of the year when flowers keep holiday. They are soul of the summer, the clock whose dial records the moments of plenty; they are the untiring wing on which delicate perfumes float; the guide of the quivering light-ray, the song of the slumberous, languid air; and their flight is the token, the sure and melodious note, of all the myriad fragile joys that are born in the heat and dwell in the sunshine. They teach us how to tune our ear to the softest, most intimate whisper of these good, natural hours. To him who has known them and loved them, a summer where there there are no bees becomes as sad and as empty as one without flowers or birds."

Honeybees: Required Reading

Highly recommended: Elizabeth Kolbert's great piece in this week's New Yorker about honeybees, beekeeping and colony collapse disorder (CCD) . Here's an outtake:

"The literature of apiculture is vast and seductive; I learned one amazing thing after another. Honeybees are the only animals besides humans known to have a representational language: they convey to one another the location of food by dancing. When the queen lays an egg, she is able to choose its sex. Males, known as drones, perform no useful function except to mate. They are loutish and filthy, and the workers—sterile females—tolerate their presence for a few months a year, then systematically murder them. A single pound of clover honey represents the distilled nectar of some 8.7 million flowers. In a week, a productive hive can add seventy pounds of honey to its stores. Pretty soon, I had moved on to beekeeping manuals."

That's how it starts...you read a couple of bee books...you get obsessed with bees...the next thing you know, you have a couple of hives in the backyard...and you're even more obsessed with bees. On the New Yorker site, you can listen to Kolbert talk about her honeybees, too. In the interview, she provides a decent overview of the bee lifecycle and extraordinary social culture.

By the way, I think the drones are cute and sweet and get an unnecessarily harsh rap in the bee lit. I'll be writing more about drones in the fall, when the mass murder is set to occur. Not looking forward to that event at all, but expect it will make for stirring prose.

Spiders!

Some wasps—or are they hornets? I'm still not clear on the difference—have set up shop on the porch, and it's been fun watching their pretty grey nest develop over the past few weeks. The wasps/hornets are definitely a presence on the porch, but so far we've all managed to stay out of each other's way. (I'm not going to even THINK about spraying pesticides with honeybees around! Besides which, I've got my karma to protect.)

The other day, as I was heading to the bee yard, I came upon this scene—a wasp struggling mightily to escape the relatively small web of a relatively small spider.
As I watched this rather horrifying drama unfold, I wasn't sure who to root for. On the one hand, working with bees, I've become more appreciative of their near-relatives, the wasps and hornets. On the other hand, I'm a big spider fan.

I tore myself away from the wrestling match to take a few pics of the honeybees and when I came back 10 minutes later, the victor was clear.

I then headed up to the garden to take some pictures of the bees on the borage plants. There, I found a goldenrod spider (a.k.a. "flower spider") polishing off one of "my" honeybees!Mortified as I was to see a beloved bee meet such a premature end, I had to admire the spider's grace and stealth. I don't think crab spiders (the family to which goldenrod spiders belong) even use a web—I believe they ambush their prey.
See how frayed the bee's wings are? That's a sign of aging, and it may have made this girl more vulnerable to ambush. Perhaps her end—while sad—wasn't so premature, after all.

P.S. I just checked on the crab spiders in one of my field guides and read this: "[Crab spiders] do not spin web snares, retreats, or overwintering nests, but the male of some species may cover a prospective female with loose silken webbing and tie the female down."

We'll just file that one under "no comment."

'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky

Borage flowers look like little stars cut by a child from the midday sky.

I planted borage in our new herb bed to receive the medicinal properties of a perfect, cloudless-day blue.
The honeybees seem to like the borage, too.How extraordinary to be a bee, plunging headfirst into the ambrosial blue.

Bee Cam!

Not my bees, but some bees coming and going in Montana.