Category Archives: Flora

The Birds & the Bees – Blue Honey?

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Spring on the Maumee River had 2 escaped white farmyard ducks trying to join in the mating fun with their wild companions. We’ll watch out for dappled white ducklings.

Among the wild ducks one often sees one single female being wooed/saught by ten or more drakes,  sometimes with much splashing. Where are the other 9?

The geese are all paired up – we never see the mating but some are obviously carrying eggs judging be the size of their tail ends. The male is more alert with head up and watching for problems like pesky photographers.

As soon as it was warm enough to fly, the bees climbed out of their winter cluster where they’d huddled for warmth.  My project this year is to simply record, as best I can with a cell phone camera, each flower harvested by the bees.

Starting with the Snowdrop: I could confirm that one as it was the only flower open when the first bees were bringing in yellow pollen.

This is my best close-up yet showing Snowdrop pollen on the hind legs, just about to be brought into the hive. Unlike the regular camera which does not like to zoom in when in macro mode, this phone camera has no macro, but when fully zoomed, and using flash, it took this amazing detail from about 4 inches away. Very hard to focus properly.

Then this delightful blue Siberian Scilla or Squill (thanks to Jen & Scott for i.d.) flower gave some bees bright blue pollen. It should be used to feed baby bees and hopefully does not make blue honey.

The Pear tree was next to blossom:

Then Myrtle:

The bees like Myrtle but so does this impersonator who seems to have no stinger (I’ll check it if I can catch it) but looks enough like a bee for the predators to avoided it.

In the river the Walleye are running and many fisherfolk are standing in very cold water for long times:

 This man caught 3 but appears to have used 4 arms to do it:

In the house, O’s Amaryllis finally decided to gloriously bloom after at least 2 years of false starts. I’m tempted to bring in a few bees for it, but Alice might not approve.

As the Equinox passed we had one clear sky at sunrise letting me catch another solar alignment. It will need a small picture placed on that sunny spot on the wall to see if it will light up again at the next Equinox on September 21st?

     

 

 

 

In the night sky last Sunday and Monday (3/25, 26) the Moon danced with Venus and Jupiter.

     

The Moon quickly shifted position as Venus and Jupiter slowly drift apart.  (The lowest 6 lights in the right hand image are only from Maumee  buildings)

 

One Final Observation:

The Exxon Valdez, which dumped so much crude oil on Alaskan shores years ago, was sold for scrap the other day. I had never realized she’d been sailing in the interim, under the most amazing name of “Oriental Nicety”.   I don’t want to know under whose flag?

Aphids, Fruit Flies, Bees & Meteorites – Errata, Omissions & Addenda

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1.  I used insecticidal soap which wiped out the tiny black aphids (in my “Jungle In Here” blog) but unfortunately it also eliminated all the orchid blossoms.

2.  For the yellow aphids on the Oleander

 I’m now brushing them off with a fine brush and I have 2 good looking buds.

3.  I’d wrongly blamed my little red wiggler worms for creating the large wine-tasting fruit fly population. I seems that open wine bottles, even with surfactant detergent to discourage water walking, starts an orgy. I’ve no idea where they do it but next day there are hundreds more fruit flies, and all are thirsty.  Simply terminating the test eliminated them all, except for one or two teetotallers on a vase of cut flowers.

4.  One amazingly warm (7 C (45 F)) day last month (Jan.) allowed me to quickly opon the hive to check that the bees still had food:

Now I see I’ve left them too much and could have harvested more but they are all happy, even hatching a few eggs,

and I hope they were glad to see me evict one clump of about 20 small hive beetles.

Now (Feb 11) it’s below freezing, as normal for this time of year, and yesterday they licked, fanned or shoveled the snow out of their doorway all by their sweet little selves.



Meanwhile, last week in down-town Phoenix, I carefully examined street flowers and had only found one single insect, until I discovered white flowering Pear trees with many happy, pollen laden honey bees.

5.  Trying to walk to the Phoenix Botanical Gardens I saw a map location which said “U of Arizona Meteorite Collection”. There I learnt that the body of a meteorite coming in from deep space is very cold despite having a momentarily hot skin for the short time while it hits our atmosphere.  To prove it, the U of A collection has one with unsinged grass stuck to it. So that nullifies the hot rock experiment in my recent “Winter Works” blog, but it does improve the chance of finding one on cold clean frozen lakes because it won’t be hot enough to melt its way through the ice.


And as to their value: the last one above is a ‘Carbonaceous Chondrite’.  Bruce Draine’s “Physics of the Interstellar ..Medium”, p. 267, says that about 1/10 of 1% of the weight of that type is composed of Nanodiamonds! Unfortunately a nanodiamond is only about 2 nanometers across (about 1/200 the wavelength of blue light) so don’t expect to see any sparkle.

Scott F. has a good idea for finding meteorites: watch for a-typical stones when snorkling over flat sandy sheltered bays. They might lie there for a long time before getting covered.

Meanwhile I continue to check flat roof tops of taller buildings. These days they are often covered with light grey sheet plastic roofing material rather than the asphalt of old. Apart from bird droppings there is very little granular material up there.

Please let me know if you find one?