The Black Bees

I mentioned in June that I've been watching very intently for honeybees this year. I'm not doing it for any particular reason; I've just been curious, what with all the talk of colony collapse disorder, about whether honeybees visit the yard, and if so how many, and so forth.

For a very long time, the closest I got was the bee-mimic fly (picture at the end of the above link). At some point in the last couple weeks, I finally saw my first honeybee. Which is much, much longer than I was expecting to have to wait.

It's entirely possible that the long wait to see one has a lot more to do with what we've chosen to plant here, and not much of anything to do with how they're doing overall. (However: I saw one yesterday on a marigold that didn't fly away when I approached it. I didn't sit there and poke at it or anything, but it didn't strike me as healthy.) In any case, because I've been watching so closely, I can report that the tiny bees and hoverflies from the June post have now given way to a different group of pollinators. The bee-mimic flies are still occasional visitors. The husband poured more concrete a week or two back and butterflies were really into that, and a few have stuck around for the marigolds. I see bumblebees here and there, though they're small: not the bumblebees I remember as a kid.

But then there are the black bees. So many black bees.

I don't know what species they are; Google has led me to a number of websites, but there are many, many kinds of bees. A carpenter bee of some kind seems most probable -- many of them are the right color and approximately the right size -- but I have very little confidence in that guess. I've never seen the black bees before this year, either, as far as I can remember, which is weird. (Also weird: the green metallic bees I saw four years ago are entirely absent this year.)

I'm very fond of them, whatever they are. In the mornings when I take Sheba out, the black bees are reliably all over the marigolds and Portulacas, even on the cloudy mornings when most of the Portulacas don't open.

I haven't bothered to take many pictures of them on the marigolds, because they're all business with the marigolds: land, nectar and/or pollen, fly away to next flower. With the Portulacas, they actually crawl down into the flowers a ways, and get all tangled in the stamens and such.

I doubt that bees experience "fun" in the way people (or even dogs) do, but they really do look like they're having fun: I can't help wanting to anthropomorphize.

They manage to collect an impressive amount of pollen. I know bees have "pollen baskets" on their legs for this exact purpose, but I can't figure out how they work to hold the pollen in. I mean, pollen is small, and the bees fly around a lot: how do they hold on to it? How do they get it back off again later?

I don't know if they sting; the husband said that he was out with Sheba a few days ago, and that he thought she'd caught one in her mouth, but she didn't seem to be in pain or anything, so if she did catch one, it apparently didn't sting her. They've never bothered me either, but then, I don't give them any reason to.

This is all just encouraging me to get even more intense with the Portulacas next year, of course. I kind of understand why they're not more widely planted -- most of the flowers that are open in the morning have closed up by the early afternoon, and the leaves and closed buds aren't particularly attractive.

But the flowers are so nice when they are open, and they're so easy to grow, that it kind of makes up for the afternoons. And anyway, pollinators dig 'em. My hands are tied. We're just going to have to plant some every year. Have to.

Question for the Hive Mind: Roadside Weeds / Wildflowers

The second and third of these are technically not roadside plants, but the first one is:

I don't recall ever seeing it before, but they're everywhere all of a sudden.

UPDATE: it's a Vernonia (ironweed), possibly V. baldwinii. Thanks to Claude and joeym.

The other two plants were in a heavily wooded park in Iowa City about a week ago. The first, I'm fairly sure, is some kind of Arisaema. I don't know if it's possible to narrow it down to a species from these pictures or not.

UPDATE: Everybody seems pretty convinced that this is Arisaema triphyllum (jack in the pulpit). Thanks to Ed Kramer, joeym, and anonymous.

The other plant from the park has flowers reminiscent of both chicory (Cichorium intybus) and meadow campion (Silene latifolia), but it's not either of those. Something related?

UPDATE: Looks like this is a Lactuca sp., possibly Lactuca floridana. Thanks to The Phytophactor and Review for their help.

Any guesses on any of these?

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Frosty Dawn 'Yen'

I've spent the last five days moving plants in at night and out in the morning -- we had a run of temperatures below 60F/16C. A lot of the plants that are outside will handle that fine (Agave, Strelitzia, Breynia, Amorphophallus), but a few won't so well (Coffea, Aloe, Synadenium, Araucaria), so they have to go back and forth. There are also some (Ananas, Furcraea, Euphorbia, Pachypodium) that might be fine, but I'm scared to leave them out for fear that they'll be damaged.

Moving plants is annoying, and exhausting, and then finding scale again this week is just the honeydew on the cake. I haven't even really gotten a chance to check the other plants for scale yet; I did look at the plants in the same room, and they seemed okay, but I added imidacloprid granules to some of them anyway because you can never be sure you checked everything.

I did also get to see scale through the microscope. It was harder than I expected to find them, and I didn't try to get any pictures because it was night and therefore way too dark. The nymphs are . . . not uncute, actually. Sort of plump like a tardigrade, but with bigger eyes.

That's a terrible description, but it's the best I can come up with. The adults, of course, are horrifying, just as you would expect.

Anyway. I'm thinking the next post'll be Tuesday, probably. In the meantime, here's a Dendrobium that I like. Every so often, the orchid show surprises me with something like this.

Dendrobium Frosty Dawn 'Yen' = Dendrobium Dawn Maree x Dendrobium Lime Frost

And then

And then the scale came back. In a room where I hadn't seen them previously (husband's office; the plant was the parent Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana). Posting may be a bit off and on for a while, as I try to determine the extent of the problem and figure out what to do about it.

I'm also setting aside some time to pound my head on my desk, curse the day I was born, and that sort of thing.

Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica

Blogging in a hurry today, again, because I've realized that the post I'd planned for today is going to require me to get some more pictures; this was also the problem with the post I'd planned for Wednesday. Things do still keep happening, though, some more impressive than others. For example, my Sansevieria cylindrica. I didn't have it when it only had one leaf, though I assume that stage happened. By the time I got it,



It had two! Two leaves! Four years passed, and then last September, it grew another, which was extremely exciting.

So then we had three! Three leaves! I figured I'd have to wait until 2016 for a fourth, but guess what . . . ?

FOUR! FOUR GLORIOUS LEAVES! AH! AH! AH! [thunder, lightning]

One of the things this probably means is that I should have been letting it spend the summer outside all along, if I wanted it to grow. Live and learn.

Pretty picture: Hibiscus 'Heartthrob'

Not a lot to say about this one; it was at the ex-job, and I noticed it partly because hardy Hibiscus flowers are very difficult to ignore, and partly because I'd already been noticing them around in people's yards as we rode into Iowa City.

There's also not a lot to say because I've been heavily preoccupied by dental matters since Saturday. Saw somebody yesterday, and apparently the pain I've been feeling doesn't indicate anything particularly wrong and isn't something that requires any kind of intervention by a dentist. So everything's fine. It was still hard to convince myself to calm down, though, after spending a whole weekend on red alert over it. Dental problems have a way of seizing one's attention.

Microphotography: Portulaca grandiflora

I'm unclear on the specifics of where and how, but the husband, knowing that I've been looking for a microscope for some time, somehow obtained a used one for me. Which is one example of how he's the best husband ever.

The catches -- and of course there are catches -- are:

1) Okay, I don't know the proper names for anything here, but I'm going to call that thing in the middle, with the four things sticking out from it, the microscope's "udder," because that's what it looks like. Each of those barrels on the udder has a different level of magnification (I don't know what levels of magnification, because I cannot decipher what the barrels say), only two of which appear to function.
2) It's a regular, old-school, 1960s-ish microscope, so it wasn't designed with digital photography in mind. If the camera lens is not exactly centered over the eyepiece, the camera doesn't register anything being there at all. Likewise if it isn't precisely the right height above the eyepiece. My hands shake way too much to get pictures by holding the camera in the right spot myself, and although we do have a tripod, the base of the microscope is just large enough to get in the way of the tripod's legs, so I can get within about a centimeter (0.4 in.) of the eyepiece, but then no further. Except! When I took the below pictures, I actually could get the tripod directly over the eyepiece. I just couldn't do it again a few days later when I moved the whole thing outside to try to get a better set of pictures in stronger light, and I don't know why, and the whole thing was very frustrating. Which leads us to the third problem, which is:
3) Even when I do manage to line the camera up, using the tripod, the amount of light coming through the eyepiece is small, so my camera uses long exposure times, which results in blurry pictures, even at its best.
4) And at its worst, the camera autofocus chooses to focus on the eyepiece itself, instead of the image in the eyepiece. Or it focuses on some part of the microscope outside the eyepiece, so I get a perfect shot of the top of the udder but the actual image I'm trying to capture is too fuzzy to make out.

So the point is that there are some problems with this, and you should, consequently, not expect to see a lot of these pictures until such time as I can figure out how to get better ones. And I would love some suggestions from other people, because I know there's got to be someone out there who's taken photographs through a microscope's eyepiece successfully.

Having said all of that, there have been some pretty cool moments with the microscope already, which I will hopefully be able to share with you someday. Portulaca grandiflora seeds, my only successful photos to date, turn out to be much more interesting than the gray, metallic dust they appear to be with the naked eye. For example, I had always imagined them as more or less spherical, since a lot of seeds are, but they turn out to have a specific, weird shape, somewhere between a comma and a nautilus:

At the higher magnification, they also have an unexpected texture, which is probably the coolest and most surprising thing I've seen in weeks. It didn't photograph well, of course:

The pattern is sort of approximately that of a bunch of tiny interlocked cogwheels, covering the whole surface of the seed. Which is even stranger in combination with the overall iridescent metallic gray color. (I now suspect that Portulaca grandiflora are robotic plants.)

I also tried for photos of the pollen, but that went even less well, and wasn't very interesting:

And those are the only actual pictures I'm able to provide to you at this point. Possible coming attractions, if I can figure out how to take the pictures:

A lot of leaves are hairier than I would have guessed. (Pedilanthus being the most surprising.) Though most leaves are disappointingly boring.

The serrated edges on Yucca guatemalensis are a lot less regular in shape and spacing than I expected.

Cryptanthus pollen is even more dull than Portulaca pollen: basically just irregular little white rounded things. At least Portulaca pollen has a color to it.

Ceropegia woodii flowers look exactly the way you would expect them to look, and brought to mind both "eyelashes" and "houseflies." Aeschynanthus speciosus flowers are boring and look just like they do with the naked eye, except bigger. Neofinetia roots didn't do much for me. (Think "styrofoam.") The Euphorbia fungus (yes, I still have Euphorbia fungus) looked exactly like I expected (sort of a creeping white net), and was dull.

Broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) really does have flowers (when you let it bloom), and the flowers are actually sort of pretty. I mean, if they were twenty times bigger, you'd grow the plant as an ornamental: there's a white, fluffy bottlebrush sort of stamen, with lots of white spherical pollen grains, and then the stigmas, or something I take to be the stigmas, are sort of shaped like white tulips with purple stripes down the center of each petal. (Plantago major is high on the list of stuff to get pictures of, whenever I figure out how to do that, but you can get some idea from the picture here at Wikimedia Commons. There must be some natural variation, though, because that's a darker, solid purple than what I was seeing.)

Another high-priority item: Anthurium spadices. It's a little easier for me to believe that those are flowers, now that I've seen them close-up. (I'd link to a photo, but I couldn't find one easily on Google image search.) It should probably be noted that they're still not pretty. At best, interesting.

Spider mites are every bit as horrifying as you'd think they would be, and they will continue to suck sap out of a leaf even after it's been removed from the plant. They also do this weird thing where they either shake their back legs like a dog getting a belly rub, or they rub their rearmost pair of legs together like a person trying to warm their hands. I only saw it do that once, and it was fast. I was so surprised and freaked out by there being, suddenly, movement, that I can't tell you exactly what it was. It also convinced me to throw the leaf in the trash more or less immediately afterward.

I think I've seen spider mite eggs now, though they weren't all the same color, so I'm not 100% on that. (They were all somewhere in the yellow or yellow-orange color range, but the darkness varied a lot, from pale yellow down to almost black.)

Some unknown white thing that was on our lettuce was one of the scariest things I've ever seen. It somehow managed to evoke deep-sea crabs, skeletons, spiders, and ghosts simultaneously, and I'm pretty sure seeing them come into focus in the microscope took a year off my life. The best match I found on-line for them was here, on a forum where they were identified as the shed exoskeletons of a molted aphid here. (The pictures at the link aren't magnified enough to be upsetting, FWIW.) So "skeleton" and "ghost" were actually pretty close. That also explains why they weren't moving.

So the point is, there's a lot of potential for interesting new posts, if only I can figure out how to get the pictures. It's going to take some experimentation, and I only have so much time, so if anybody has any relevant expertise, I'd sure appreciate hearing from you.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Mr. Wonderful

I'm not sure Paphiopedilums can ever be less than okay, in my book. That said, "Wonderful" sort of sounds like it's trying too hard.

This particular hybrid dates back to 1916, though; maybe the word had different connotations then.

Paphiopedilum Mr. Wonderful = P. Knock Knock x P. Gloriosum