Bee Update

Joe came over with one of his bee hive boxes after I contacted him about the swarm yesterday.  They had gone from the two groups on the forsythia bush to one large group on the ground, which is the opposite of the direction I assumed they were heading.

Joe placed the box next to the swarm and put in it a little dish of sugary water from the hummingbird feeders.  We waited.  They paid it no attention.  While we watched, some of the scouts returned with their reports, doing their little bee dance.

After another while of waiting in vain for them to want to go inside the box, we sprayed some sugar water on the ground between the swarm and the box, and even a little on the swarm itself.  They still didn't care.  

Finally, Joe picked up a twig and poked around gently in the swarm until he located the queen.  He scooped her up with a few workers hanging on to her and the twig and quickly stuck them into the box.  They still didn't seem to care.  In fact, when we looked in the box, the few that had gone along for the ride had gone away and left the queen alone!  

Something drastic had to be done.  Joe scooped up a shovel full of bees and brushed them into the box. Then they paid attention.  In fact, they got quite perturbed.  But then, in a few seconds, the others still outside began an orderly march into the box.

A little more than two-thirds of the group were inside within a few minutes, but the remainder stayed out in their clump, and by nightfall, I suppose they'd all gone indoors, because this morning, there were none left on the ground.

Joe said he was puzzled because this really isn't a good time of the year for bees to be swarming.  They'll need to be able to forage enough food to get the colony through the winter, and it's getting late in the year for flowering plants.  I'm hoping and assuming the bees know what they're doing and will make it.  At least I know they know more about what they're doing than I do.  About what they're doing, I mean.  And perhaps more about what they're doing than I know about what I'm doing, too.

Joe returned this evening and packed up the hive to go back to his place.  He's going to rob another colony he has that has enough honey to spare to give this group a supplement that will hopefully keep them in good shape for the winter if foraging for the remainder of the year doesn't provide enough to feed them.

Good luck bees!

UPDATE:  Joe says the bees left the hive after a couple of days.  I hope they found their way to a good place to start their new colony.

Bees in the Trees and Other Creatures

Gardening is slow these days, so I'm going to be posting on the periphery, as it were.  I may get ambitious and plant some fall crops.  And then again, I may have missed my window for most things.

When I was doing some periodic mulch bed weeding early this morning at a bed of forsythia bushes, I kept hearing the buzzing of bees but not seeing them.  When I worked my way around to the back side of the bed, I saw the source: a honeybee swarm on the ground, and so I thought they'd found something there that attracted them.  As I looked around a bit, I saw two more swarms on the forsythia branches, and it occurred to me that they weren't fighting over anything on the ground, but rather this was a phenomenon called (appropriately) swarming, when a colony of bees is looking for a new home.  Nearby, bees were swarming in and out of a large hole left from the removal of a branch from the large cypress tree next to the house.  Maybe that's the home they've chosen, or maybe that's the home they're leaving.  I've put in a call to a neighbor who keeps bees and harvests the honey to see if he would like to collect the ones in the forsythia before they've moved on.  At least, I think they're honeybees.

I have a picture of the small ground swarm, but it's a bit like a Where's Waldo photo since the bees are the same color as the soil and dead grass at the edge of the mulch ring:

The tree swarms are more noticeable.

I once saw an enormous bee swarm in a tree while I was working on the MU campus landscape, which is where I learned about the phenomenon.  It was awesome.  Students, faculty and staff were frightened and unwilling to let it alone, even though it was not in a high-traffic area.  They wouldn't be dismissed by assurances that the swarm would be moving on within a day or two and wanted the landscape department to get rid of them.  I don't recall what the outcome was, as I wasn't involved in the decision-making, other than asserting my opinion and expressing indignation that the landscape staff would even consider killing the bees.  Politics, I was reminded, was the driving force on a public university, not ecology.  Maybe they found a beekeeper to come get them.  Or maybe they stalled until the bees left on their own. We humans do have irrational fears of nature.  I'm not crazy about snakes, myself.  But none of these people, I'd be willing to bet, was afraid to walk along sidewalks and cross the streets surrounded by hundreds of fast-moving automobiles, which is infinitely riskier than walking past a tree with a bee swarm in it, unless perhaps you're one of those persons who is so allergic that you'll die if you get stung even once - then maybe the risk is about equal.

But, I digress.

I also saw a wheel bug couple mating on the shrub roses when I was collecting yesterday morning's Japanese beetles.  Not many beetles were there today, hooray, but their predecessors have already destroyed the looks of the shrubs and robbed them of much of this year's chlorophyll supply.

Wheel bugs are identifiable by a prominent half-disc shaped protuberance on their thorax that has little spines on it, making it resemble a gear wheel.

I'm always happy to see bugs of this family (Reduviidae) because they feed on plant-eating insects such as aphids and beetles.

By the way, for a little bit of trivial information: we tend to call all insects bugs, but the term 'bug' actually applies, technically, only to certain species of insects.  Wheel bugs, stink bugs, shield bugs, cicadas, aphids, and leafhoppers are among the order of "true bugs" - the order Hemiptera.  Other insects that we name bugs, such as lady bugs, lightning bugs, and June bugs are actually beetles and are classified in the order Coleoptera.  There you go.  More information you didn't want.

And, while I'm on the subject, assassin bugs are true bugs in the Reduviid family, and I think this common name is applied to a number of species in that family, including the wheel bug.  There is a type of assassin that bites people known as a kissing bug, because it seems to prefer to bite around your mouth.  I don't want to talk about those vampiric fellows, but if you're interested, you can check out the kissing bug page on the Texas A&M website.  It's not a pleasant read.

That said, assassin bugs of all types might bite, and it isn't a nice kiss, so don't try to play with them.  I think they're called assassins because of the way they kill their prey by stabbing into them with  long, needle-like mouth parts.  I came across one helping me with Japanese beetle control last year.

If you're disappointed that this whole post has been about insects and not garden plants (although you don't have a garden without insects), I'll throw in this consolation:

I had in my mind a couple of years ago when I bought two rhubarb plants at Granddaddy's Nursery in Marshall that the variety 'Victoria' was a red-stalked plant.  They're growing fabulously and produce a lot of good pie stalks, but the stems aren't red.  Here's one from the first year:

There's just a little bit of red coloration at the base of the stems.  I thought that maybe, having purchased the small plants at the end of Granddaddy's season, and there being only a couple left, they'd gotten mixed up with another variety.  

I can't complain about the quality of those plants, because they're hale and hearty, and this year I got enough for about ten pies out of two plants.  There's probably enough still there for another pie, but I'll leave it to strengthen the plant for following years.  But, even though the green variety is just as delicious, I really did want red.  It seems quite arrogant to me at this point that I thought the plants might have been a mix-up rather than that I might have been mistaken about the actual color of the Victoria variety, but I was sure it was red.  Even if I wasn't right.

So, this year I ordered some Victoria seed to start some red-stemmed plants myself.  

Some of the stems are reddish just like the plants I got at Granddaddy's.  As they get larger, though, it's obvious they aren't going to stay red.  At least I wasn't arrogant enough this time to think that the seeds I bought may have been another mix-up, so I went back to the internet to check Victoria again.  Indeed, it's a green variety, although when I look for rhubarb plants and seeds online, most all that I come across are Victoria yet accompanied by the misleading generic picture of red rhubarb stalks.  Perhaps this is how I got it stuck in my head that it was a red variety to begin with. 

I've had a hard time finding a source for one of the very red varieties, but I think I've finally found some seeds at a company called Downright Natural.  I ordered a packet of Cherry Red and a packet of Holstein, and I'll let you know how that turns out.

Til next time.

Late Summer Gardening

There's not much to be done right now but simple maintenance.  And, compared to June and July, August has been balmy and comfortable, so it's possible to pull weeds and cut back dying and overgrown plant material without melting.  Crazy weather.

Blooms are just recently appearing on the lima beans and the ornamental hyacinth bean.

I'm still collecting Japanese beetles off a group of shrub roses at the edge of the wildflower garden, but the carbaryl sprays seem to have eliminated them from the ferned-out asparagus, and there's only ever one or two on the tea roses in pots at the house, so Julia Child (the butter yellow rose) is coming out again.  

Early morning dew shows up spider webs.

I'm a big spider fan.  To clarify:  a big fan of spiders.  But, also a fan of big spiders.  Not so much of big caterpillars.  I found this baby tomato hornworm a couple of days ago on the volunteer tomato.  You can see that they are aptly named.  The hornworms, not the tomatoes.  Although tomatoes may be aptly named, too.  

These suckers (well, they're chewers) can get bigger than my thumb.  Which would you say is the head end?

If you said the end without the horn - and I know you did - you're right.  It's amazing how much these guys can eat in a short period of time.  Here's a nice picture of the adult moth stage, which I don't ever see, and as large as they are, you'd think I might.  They have to lay their eggs in the immediate area for me to find the caterpillar (larva) stage.  It's from gymnosprout.blogspot.

If you're interested in the life cycle of the hornworm, check out the University of Florida's sheet with pictures, including one of a parasitized hornworm, which I've also never actually seen, but if I ever do, I'll be sure and take a picture, and leave alone in order to let the parasites live and (hopefully) establish a population.

Speaking of the volunteer tomato plant, I'm positive it's one of the "purple" varieties I planted, but I don't know which.  I just know it isn't Black Icicle, because that's a Roma style tomato.  One of those is growing as a volunteer on my compost pile.

The reason I know it's a purple one is the coloration, which is typical of several of the purple varieties I planted.  I don't know if it's true of all purples or not.  But these have a dark green top that looks like glazed frosting over a lighter green blossom end.

Sorry for the poor focus on the nearer tomato.  Here's a clear picture from 2014 of Black Krim:

Black Prince and Cherokee Purple were both planted last year near the area where the volunteer is growing, and I can't tell the difference.  At least not yet.  If I recall correctly, Black Prince is a smaller, rounder tomato than Cherokee Purple.  Whichever it is, it's going along nicely on the trellis I built for the cucumbers that died out in all the rain.

I haven't harvested any tomatoes for about a week, and only a couple are looking ripe enough to pick.  The remainder are all still small and green.  That long spell of very high temperatures put the kibosh on fruit set, and the accompanying large amounts of rain encouraged the plants to grow lush and tall.  They're now coming out way over the top of the cages and hanging down.  I have to keep training the limbs back onto the cages.  

The lettuce mix I planted on the 12th is up and coming.  

It's near the tatsoi, arugula and cabbages I planted at the end of June, all of which are beset by some tiny flying insects that are chewing zillions of little holes in the leaves.  It's not whiteflies, but beyond that, I don't know what it is, because it was so hot in July I let that patch go, and now I'm sorry.  I did spray it a couple of times recently with spinosad and cut back the plants in hopes of knocking back the population so the plants can grow to usefulness.  

Recently I was reading about making an insecticidal tea from rhubarb leaves.  The claim was that this works because rhubarb is not bothered by insects.  I beg to differ.  My rhubarb looks fantastic through spring and then gets regularly attacked by grasshoppers and katydids when the summer comes on.  

But it gave me an idea.  I've noticed that the stevia I plant never has been attacked by anything - insect or disease.  If I'm not too lazy, I think a good experiment would be to make a tea from stevia leaves and see if it repels or prevents insect attack when sprayed on other plants.  I know interplanting stevia doesn't work to repel insects from plants growing next to it, because I tried that experiment this year.  They happily munch away on everything else, but they never bother the stevia. 

Stevia in full sun

Stevia in partial shade

  

I'm big on ideas.  Not quite as big on implementing them.

That's it for now.  I hope you're enjoying this lovely weather.

Til next time.

The Heat Is On - Again

We had a lovely few days over the weekend, but these last two have been brutal.  This summer will go down in memory as the hottest on record.  In someone's memory.  Mine won't be able to hold onto it very long.

The Gold Rush squash seeds I planted in the tomato cage haven't germinated, and I'm guessing they're not going to, since I planted them on July 31.  The beets I planted at the same time are about an inch high.

During one of those nice days, I dug up the lovage that I'd planted the first year of my garden and which turned out to be a perennial.  I can see why it survives.  The tap roots are quite hearty.

I grew it at the suggestion of a neighbor, but I prefer the celery, which is an annual, but I like the taste of celery better, and the lovage comes up early enough that if the weather is cool - which it has been each year, and it's likely to be every year early on - it contracts a leaf spot, making it unfit for use, if you don't spray.  And I don't.  This could be an artifact of having the garden next to a wildflower garden.  I don't know.

The lima beans have just begun flowering.  I wish I'd dug out the onions sooner, since most of them rotted in the rain soaked ground anyway.  I could have extended my one short lima bean bed.

The nasturtiums are starting to look scruffy.  The flowers are nice, but the leaves are going.  But the Mexican sunflowers are still bright and cheerful, and their foliage is luxurious.

Tomatoes are starting to come on regularly.  It will be interesting to see if the weather stays warm enough long enough for them to start fruiting again and ripen before fall frost.  They grew lush with all the heat and rain, but after it turned so brutally hot in June, most of the flowers died on the vines without setting fruit.

And the okra is still producing and looking good.  That is, where it's in full sun.  It's producing, but not nearly so well, where it's in partial shade.  It's the only planting, aside from herbs and limas, that is happy with the weather we've been having.  But maybe that's not a bad thing, since I wouldn't want to have to be out in the garden tending and harvesting in this heat anyway.

'Til next time.

A Break in the Heat

We've been in the 90s for so long, it's made gardening a painful thing.  Finally, the last couple of days have been in the low to mid 80s.   We're usually hitting the very high temps about this time, not experiencing a break in the heat.  It's not predicted to last much longer, but it's wonderful while it's here.

I took the opportunity of a cooler morning a couple of days ago to rake up grass clippings.  I don't need them at the moment, but when they're available, I get them and store them under an open-front shed.  If I have dried clippings over the winter, it gives me something to mulch the early planted crops before grass mowing time comes around again.

I also spent some time weeding and cleaning in the garden.  That's how I learned my stocking-covered tomato experiment showed that it's not a way to discourage raccoons.

When I found this tomato, it was broken off the plant.  The stocking was still fully on, but the tomato was broken up inside.  I wonder if the stocking didn't just give the critter something interesting to work at.  He (or she) obviously didn't go after it because it was ripe.

I don't eat my Egyptian walking onions, although I have tasted them - green and bulb - and they're quite mild, almost sweet.  The bulbs aren't very bulbous.  They bunch together more like shallots, and their layers are thin and slippery, so they don't make a very good raw vegetable.  They might work better for cooking, but I just let them grow as an ornamental.

I got the little bulb starts from a visit to Powell Gardens in Kansas City.  They were giving them away, and I know why.  I have lots I could give away, too, if I could find someone foolish enough to take them.  Actually, they don't spread terribly fast, and they are interesting to look at.  They look nice enough early on, but by mid summer they've fallen and look rather pathetic.  This year, the bunch was large enough that I pulled them all out and replanted a few bulbs, which are produced at the top of the plant from the flower.  Since I leave them as a perennial and don't use them for anything, I don't have them in my record, and I have a terrible memory - worse than ever since retiring - so I don't know when I planted them, but they're about seven or eight inches high again.   And a borage volunteer is coming up with them.  Not to mention a few weeds.

Speaking of volunteers - the volunteer basils are looking lovely.  And flowering.  I've used the flowers themselves in dishes for nice texture variety.  These may be crosses between purple  and sweet basils.  But they may also be how those varieties came back, since if they were hybrids, and I imagine they were, they wouldn't come back from seed looking like the parent plant anyway.

I've got what I think of as two oregano plants that have come back each year and are now quite large.  I'm not altogether certain one of them isn't marjoram, but I think it's also a basil.  It's very peppery.  The first year I planted the garden, I bought several kinds of herbs from Lakewood Lawn & Garden in Columbia, and I vaguely remember having bought a spicy oregano.  I also bought a marjoram, but that may have not made it through winter.  I did insert the labels into the ground with the plants, but after mulching and winters, that spicy plant lost its label.  I read that the way to tell marjoram from basil is the shape of the flower calyx.  This is going to require some more investigation with my microscope and some scientific literature.  For now, I think I've got two basils - Greek and spicy.  The Greek one has pink flowers, and the spicy one has white.  Also, the Greek's leaves are significantly larger.

My Kent Beauty ornamental oregano is still quite small, but holding its own and growing.  Flowering, even.  I hadn't noticed the actual flowers on the one I planted the first year.  The bracts are what's noticeable.  This time, since I'm watching it so closely, I see that it does have tiny little flowers.  I may not be able to find the seeds.  No wonder they're expensive.

Pink flowers at 1 o'clock and between 7 & 8.

The large Mexican sunflower was looking pretty haggard, so I collected the seed from some of the spent blooms and pulled it out.  Actually, I cut it out in order to leave a stem stump with roots to feed one stem that had fallen over and is still looking healthy, although it's nearly broken off from the main stem.  When I pulled up the other stems, wherever they had rested on the ground, they'd sent out roots.  (This may be why the true sunflowers I moved and stuck deep in the ground stayed healthy - they may have, like tomatoes, put out roots along the buried part of the stem.)  

This is good to know for future cultivation.  If I didn't want to see that length of stem lying on the ground, I could simply cover it with soil and mulch over it.  

If you're in mid-Missouri, enjoy your next day or two of nice weather.  It's going to heat up again real soon.

'Til next time.

Daily Garden Chores

At this time of the year, daily chores in the garden amount to harvesting and weeding.  In dry years, it might also include watering.  The copious amounts of rain and the months-long run of high temperatures this year have been a boon to the weeds.

I'm not harvesting as many tomatoes as I'd like to be, but they don't seem to be thrilled with the temperature themselves.  I don't know which of the critters has been after my ripening tomatoes, but I've found a couple that would have been nice slicers had they not been chewed up by somebody.

I got the idea from my cousin's comment about putting pantyhose on cabbages to keep bugs off them to see if that could work to keep stink bugs and other piercing insects off the tomatoes.  It would take a lot of stockings, therefore making it impractical, but I wanted to do the experiment anyway.

I did see one bug crawl across a sheathed tomato and keep going.  I'm going to see if this lets me leave the ones near the ground to ripen longer without being eaten by whomever is coming around at night.  I think it must be a raccoon, because one of the tomatoes higher than a rabbit could reach was eaten, and I don't know how dexterous a possum is and whether they can get up on their hind legs.

I had to spray my roses with carbaryl (Sevin) again yesterday for Japanese beetle control.  That makes the third time.  The residual lasts a good while on the leaves, but those pesky boogers burrow down into the rose petals where the spray doesn't reach while the rose is still in bud stage.

They've been destroying my Julia Child roses as fast as they bud out.  They don't do as much damage to Pink Enchantment, very little to Shazam!, and they don't seem to bother the red roses at all.  Those are in shady spots.  I wonder if that's the reason.  I'll get at the spraying early next spring, because I'd like to have this kind of display all summer:

Pink Enchantment

Pink Enchantment

Julia Child

Red roses in shade (they were here before me; don't know their name)

Shazam!

Shazam!

Shazam!

Yesterday, I collected fewer beetles than usual from the okra, and this morning I found less than a half dozen on the plants.  Maybe their season is about to be over.  I sure hope so.  I've been picking them since the second week of June, and recalling that expert management article I read that said they only last about a month.

They will have laid eggs in the soil, so I know I'll have some next year again, but I hope that by having the carbaryl waiting in the spring I'll be able to stay ahead of them.  I'll still have to capture them from my okra.

Japanese beetles on ferned-out asparagus

I've heard a couple people talking about putting up pheromone traps that they purchased to rid themselves of Japanese beetle, and I think they've wasted their money.  When I was studying pest management, the consensus was that the traps actually lure beetles from great distances that you wouldn't otherwise have.  When I was doing research on the MU campus, I put up the traps down in an area away from the ornamental plantings just for that reason.  If those traps would keep the bugs off your plants, they might be worth it, but if even a few go to the plants instead of the traps, they can do a whole lot of damage in a little bit of time.  You might be helping your neighbors, however, by attracting their beetles to your place.

My pathetic little Kent Beauty oregano is still hanging in there and growing, and I'm cheering it on.  It has one tiny little flower on it.  Or, it had one.  I thought it was a flower that dropped off the lavender plant next to it and picked it off!  If you know what you're looking for, you can see it near the end of the stem at the bottom of the picture below nestled between light green bracts.  It's trumpet shaped and looks white in the picture, but it looked purple on the plant.  That's why I thought it was from the lavender.  Those bracts will eventually turn a pale pink, and perhaps that's why I never saw any flowers on the plant I had the first year.  They quickly blended into the bracts.  Or maybe it didn't flower.  I don't know.  But what I do know is that if I pick off the flowers, there's no way I'm going to get any seed.  They must be microscopic.

If the cucumber plants hadn't died off, I would expect to still be harvesting some of them.  And perhaps the squash.  Alas, I think too much rain did in both of those early on.  

I'm still tending some seedlings I've got growing.  I gave away eight rhubarb starts, and I have eight left.  I'll probably plant four or five of them - somewhere! - and give the remainder to a local church garden that donates their produce to a food bank.

I also have some cypress seedlings that I've dug up from sprouts in the yard and potted.  I'm hoping to get a few decent saplings to plant between the house and the corn/bean field.  There's one old beauty far too near the house that was planted back when the house was built, I think.  It drops its leaves into the rain gutters and clogs up the downspouts.  It's the only one like it that I know of around here, and hopefully, by the time it's dying off, I will have managed to get some of its progeny established.*

How is your garden growing?  I hope your harvest is plentiful.

Drop me a line in the comments section (above every post).

'Til next time.

*Update:  I've just learned that in fact there's a cypress at a house a couple of miles down the road, but much younger and smaller, and that someone else has one at a house in Blackwater, about three miles away.  I've driven by both these houses many times.  See how observant I am?