Daylilies

You're probably seeing daylilies showing up in gardens and elsewhere this week.   Asiatic daylilies are in genus Hemerocallis, and are considered to be an adaptable perrenial staple for many gardeners.  I've read that they're considered by some to be invasive, and I've seen little clumps in remote places occasionally. I like them for the same reason I like the mallows: they produce a new flower almost daily (although each flower lasts for only about 24 hours).

Bees and Poplars, Poison Ivy, and Propolis

I need some feedback from Mid-Atlantic bee experts (or specifically you folks in the Eastern Panhandle or Western Maryland).

Yesterday I recorded bees returning loaded with a very orange pollen.  My friend thought it was from poplars.  Tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) are sometimes called Tulip poplar or yellow poplar by older foresters and the lumber industry, and I knew of only younger Tulip trees nearby.  Cottonwoods (Populus deltoides) are in the same genus as aspens, the true poplars in the Salicaceae family.  We have a giant cottonwood down by the river and of course, they produce seeds like no other tree, but their pollination should have been complete many weeks earlier (March or April).  You'll hear us confuse this in the video.   Now that I've done some reading, I'm guessing he was talking about tulip trees, not cottonwoods.

But the next day I was building a new horse trail / walking trail and heard a lot of buzzing.  When I went exploring I found honeybees pollinating the Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron radicans and formerly Rhus toxicodendron and Rhus radicans).  I haven't finished researching this, but I've learned some believe that the raw honey helps build a resistance to the allergic reaction from exposures to the plant oil.  Interestingly, I've also read that many people are allergic to the Cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale), in the same Anacardiaceae family as poison ivy, and that makes them more expensive to harvest.

So after further exploration, I now think the orange material these bees were transporting is propolis from the cottonwoods.  According to the well-researched Wikipedia article, propolis is believed to reinforce the structural stability of the hive, reduce vibration, make the hive more defensible by sealing alternate entrances, prevent diseases and parasites from entering the hive, inhibit bacterial growth, and prevent putrefaction within the hive.  And while bees usually carry waste out of and away from the hive, they sometimes seal larger invaders in propolis, essentially mummifying it and making it odorless and harmless.

Red-Winged Blackbirds

I saw the first Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) in the lower fields today.  These birds sometimes winter as far north as Pennsylvania, but in Hampshire County they are always a signal of Summer.  The females are non-descript and resemble a very large sparrow.  In fact, I've spent an embarrissingly long time trying to determine what large sparrow I was seeing only to later realize it was a female RWB.   Of course, the males are unmistakable.  

Capturing a Swarm

The old hives are gone.

I burned our old, unused hives last week in preparation for three new nuc (for nucleus) boxes this afternoon.  Brian Umstead offered to replace my old hives because of our setting, and I welcomed the opportunity.

I've researched native pollinators and done workshops on building habitats, but I'm relatively new to honeybees.  In 2005, one of my ninth graders, almost apologetically, asked if he could build an apiary for his project even though there was no control, or independent or dependent variables.  I said, "Of course." and we talked about mentors and training classes with local beekeeping groups.  


After I left to teach at Virginia Tech, he and other students convinced the principal and the school system administrators to keep hives on the roof of the school.  I regularly use this as an example of the importance of student autonomy in project-based learning.  But beyond that, and a few lessons in harvesting honey from Steve Martin at ChurchView Farm, I don't have much  experience with honeybees.

Above:  Brian captures the swarm with sugar water.

Below:  Luring the remaining bees into the hive in the new 

location.

So just as we were finishing, Brian suggested trying to capture a swarm and installing a larger hive.   I grabbed one of the taller ladders and we drove over to Foxwalk Farm.  Brian put on a suit and climbed up with a sugar-water soaked comb to lure the bees from a cedar tree.  A couple hundred climbed on, and I swapped the comb with a fresh one.  But after a short while, it became clear that to get the swarm to come as a whole, we'd need to remove the whole end of the branch they were swarming.  I did the cutting, so I only caught some of the events on video.

We clipped the branches around the swarm and stuffed them all into a box for traveling back to our farm.  The challenge then became removing them from the branch. Eventually, we had to just knock them off, then help those inside the hive attract the rest inside.

We're concerned that we might not have much of a Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) bloom this year, but we have an abundance of early and late blooming raspberries, and then Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) that will hopefully keep them interested in staying.

In case you're wondering, the louder, constant hum you here in the background is not the hives, it's Diane mowing on the bigger tractor.

Mating Wood Turtles

We see wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) in and just above the annual flood plain nearly every week from April to October and beyond, but this is the first time I've seen them mating.