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.