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.

Meanders

Just trust me.

Rebel Rebel's Queen

Last week, during a "check in" on Rebel Rebel, I was fortunate enough to see (and hear!) the queen. Below, you can see some of the workers gathered around her, kind of encircling her. She's the larger "redder" bee below them. This stance, whereby the bees face inward toward their queen, is one of the easiest ways to spot a queen. Maeterlinck describes this encircling as looking like a grandmother's brooch, while a more recent book describes it as a daisy, with the workers as the petals and the queen at the flower's core.
Here's a better shot of the queen as she makes an all-too-brief appearance, only to be subsumed again moments later by her attentive and protective compatriots.

Live! The Swarm! On Video!

I guess video isn't really live, but these days it's pretty close. I was so blown away by seeing my first swarm (nearly a month ago today) that I kind of flipped out and started repeating myself (and talkin' a bit like a Beverly Hillbilly), but I'm sure you'll overlook that and focus on the truly amazing phenomenon at hand. Enjoy!


After a few intense minutes of flying through the air with the greatest of ease (even in a very high wind), the swarm alights on a small sumac, where it clusters around its queen.

Got Milkweed?

I’m glad I asked the farmer’s son not to cut the humble stand of milkweed along the barbed wire fence. Twice a summer, the local dairy farmers hay the field for cow feed and bedding. If the weather’s right and the field’s growing well, they might just get a third cut in.

But the honeybees have been so enjoying the 207 milkweed plants (yes, I counted them), that when I heard the tractor coming up the road for the second haying of summer, I ran outside to intercept. I pointed to the purple flowers and asked the driver—the farmer’s 12-year-old son—to please spare them. The kid visibly recoiled when I explained that I’d started beekeeping and that the bees really loved those flowers. Thanks to his kind compliance in mowing around the milkweed-populated edge of the field (probably in large part to avoid the dreaded bees), the frenzied action on the milkweed blossoms has continued unabated for more than two weeks now.Along with the pleasure of watching dozens of honeybees visit the milkweed blossoms, there is the delight of listening to the satisfied work-sound of the proverbial busy bees. Several times a day, I find myself drawn up the hill to the milkweed stand to receive a dose of "happy buzz" therapy. The bees softly rising and landing on the blossoms, the hazy-sweet aroma permeating the area, and the concerted hum of bees fulfilling their life’s mission are quintessential expressions of summertime—the place I want to be.

The bees have drawn me to the milkweed, but the milkweed has turned out to hold a fascination all its own. Its a pollinator-magnet, hosting a kaleidoscopic array of life forms so fascinating I’m seriously considering a mid-life career shift to entomology.

Milkweed also has a nefarious side, as we'll see in a moment. But first let's walk on the sunny side of the Milkweed Street and say howdy to some of the many denizens of and visitors to this remarkable plant.

Many of us know milkweed as the host plant for the famed monarch butterfly, which (unfortunately) has proven too nimble and elusive for this paparazzo. I have been able to catch the monarch in its caterpillar form: an unparalleled example of the marriage of style and substance.

Other, less camera shy butterflies have been enjoying the milkweed as well.
The Great Spangled Frittilary

The Eastern Comma (At least I think it's a comma. If there are any serious bug people reading this, please feel free to correct this or any other inaccurate IDs.)

Some kind of Hairstreak (possibly Edwards)

The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Some type of skipper.

Some other kind of skipper.

There have also been many moths, including one of my day-flying faves, the Virginia Ctenuchid Moth.

But the real revelation was going to visit these plants at night. Hundreds—and I mean hundreds—of moths gather there, making the daytime scene look subdued by comparison. My night shots aren't so hot, but you get the idea.
The cast of characters seen during the day also includes...The Small Eastern Milkweed Bug

The leafcutting bee (I think that's what it is)

A drone fly.

Japanese Beetle

A bee-like fly?

Golden Northern Bumblebee (I think—in any case, it's adorable!)

Milkweed Longhorn

Green Stinkbug (Note that the lower part of the insect's left leg is missing. Also note the little yellow "droplet" adhering to its right leg. The story behind all this will soon be revealed.)

An unidentified dragonfly.

A beetle and an ant.

Some kind of bumblebee?

Hornets and wasps of various kinds.

Now let's turn our attention to the aforementioned "nefarious" side of milkweed. WARNING: Some of these images are of a graphic nature (pun intended)—and may upset small children or exceedingly sheltered adults.

Some weeks ago, much to my horror, I began to notice honeybees entering the hive with tiny bright yellow "spokes" attached to their feet, giving the appearance of some kind of deformity. These bees were "limping" into the hive, dragging their feet in a most disturbing manner. In most cases, the deformity appeared on one or both of the hind feet, but sometimes it was apparent on the front feet as well, as in the case of this poor bee.Needless to say, I freaked. I then proceeded to spend a quiet, anxiety-filled evening Googling variations on the terms honeybee foot deformity, honeybee foot anomaly, honeybee foot anatomy, honeybee foot fungus, honeybee medical conditions, and honeybee disease. Like a first-year medical student studying malady after malady, it wasn't long before I started experiencing symptoms of the many horrid honeybee diseases out there. However, nothing I found resembled the strange foot disorder.

Luckily, my Organic Beekeeping listserv once again came to the rescue. Someone on the list explained that if milkweed was blooming in my area (and it was), the foot "deformity" might actually be little pieces of milkweed pollen that had gotten stuck on the bees' feet. Sure enough, the very next day while perusing the milkweed I found a dead bee with these bits of pollen stuck to both her hind feet and forefeet. During the same visit, I got this photo of a bee working the milkweed blossoms with this strange botanical material attached to her feet and proboscis.
I also began to notice that various insects, including honeybees, flies, and moths, were becoming "stuck" to the blossoms. Here, a fly struggles to extricate its foot.
It seems the milkweed plant extracts a price for access to its alluring nectar. According to a delightful book published in the 1920s called Honey Plants of North America:

"Milkweed flowers are called pinch-trap flowers because they possess a remarkable clip-mechanism found in no other family of plants. Two club-shaped masses of pollen are attached by flexible bands to a small, dry, triangular disc placed midway between them. In this membraneous disc there is a wedge-shaped slit at one end. In its effort to obtain a foothold on the smooth flowers an insect is likely to thrust a claw, leg, antennae, or tongue into one of the slits. If one of these organs is drawn upward in the slit, the dry disc becomes tightly clamped to it. When the insect flies away it carries with it the disc and the two masses of pollen strapped to it. Exposed to the air, the strap-like stalks dry and draw the pollinia close together. As the insect alights on another flower, they are easily thrust between two anther wings, where they come in contact with the stigma; but, once inserted and pulled upward, they can not again be withdrawn. The insect can obtain its liberty only by breaking the connecting bands. If it cannot do this, it perishes slowly of starvation. Disc after disc may thus become attached to an insect until it is crippled or helpless."

Here's a closer look at the "ball and chain" structure in question. Note the tiny black string of "beads" attached to the bee's feet, as well as the bright yellow pollen.

A captive moth struggling to escape. Milkweed Street is rich in colorful characters, but not without its sad dramas.

A moth that didn't make it. Note the moth-dust on the three surrounding buds: evidence of a frantic, protracted struggle.
A limb sacrificed for the greater good.
After my psychodrama with Google, I felt a little less alone when I read the remainder of the entry in the Honey Plants book:

"Not a season passes that inquiries are not received from beekeepers requesting information in regard to these peculiar appendages; and many explanations of them have been given by persons not familiar with the flowers of the milkweed. Some regard them as a fungus, others as a protuberance growing on the bee's leg, and still others as a winged insect-enemy of the bee."

And here's what it's all about: once pollinated, the flower morphs into a tiny pod that grows to become the familiar, canoe-shaped milkweed pod that cracks open in fall and spreads its silky-topped seed pods through wind dispersal.
The milkweed—its pedestrian, somewhat demeaning name notwithstanding—turns out to be a rather exciting plant: sweet-smelling and good-looking enough to attract a dazzling array of pollinators, unique in its role as the sole host plant for the glorious monarch butterfly, and clever enough to have evolved a form of pollination insurance unique in the plant world.

The humble stand of milkweed at the edge of the field has turned out to be a most intriguing spot to hang out this summer. Like I said, I'm glad the farmer didn't cut it down.
***
A weathered old honeybee with tattered wings works the milkweed blossom.