Corpse Flower Time Again

There will be another Amorphophallus titanum (Corpse Flower/Titan Arum) flowering event here at the University of Connecticut. This one caught us a bit more by surprise than usual, since it's coming from our tuber #3, which flowered once back in June 2007, but has done nothing but produce foliage since then.

The inflorescence doesn't seem like it will be especially gigantic, even after that long wait (it's at 4 feet tall and slowing down its growth now). Plant #3 produced a more colorful, more widely flared spathe than our other mature Titan Arum the last time it bloomed, though. I'll predict that it will open for the summer solstice, June 20, but keep a close eye on the UConn greenhouse webpage if you're hoping to smell it in person.

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Edited to add: It looks like tonight is the big night: June 16,  just like the Corpse Flower last year. The greenhouse will be open at least until 11 PM, if anyone wants to come see it. I'll be there earlier in the evening. 

There's a Little Black Spot on the Sun Today

The weather in Connecticut wasn't ideal for viewing the transit of Venus, and for most of the day clouds hid the sun completely. But around 7:00 PM, when the transit was in progress but the sun hadn't set yet, the clouds broke for a bit, and I scrambled to get set up with binoculars to project an image onto a sheet of paper. The sun was just about to disappear behind the trees, and the clouds kept drifting into the way, but I did get a few minutes of good transit viewing.

I took some photos, and if anything is visible I'll add them later. Unfortunately, in the rush to get outside I forgot my good camera.

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Edited to add: OK, here's my photos of the evening of the transit in Storrs, Ct, and the sun as projected through binoculars. You can see Venus in the left image of the sun, in the upper left portion of the sun's face, but half behind the clouds and in the form of a shaky picture from a camera that was obsolete at the time of the previous transit in 2004.

Viewing conditions were suboptimal.

Look closely at the upper left part of the projected sun for a small dark disc.

Beginning Beekeeping

Honeybees visiting snow crocus in March. 

For a while, I've been interested in trying beekeeping. Recently, various factors including moving to a house in a fairly rural area and my girlfriend's sister getting some hives, have provided an impetus towards actually starting a hobby apiary. So, I took the Eastern Connecticut Beekeeper's Association bee school this winter, and ordered the basic equipment.

 

Here's the unassembled hive, which arrived back in February and took weeks of on-and-off labor to put together and prepare. A Langstroth hive is more complex than you might imagine from looking at one from the outside, and there is a lot of internal structure. It's sort of like building a very large, very repetitive model kit.   

 

 The smoker test was successful. A little smoke makes bees easier to work with: they respond by loading up on honey, which makes them docile and unlikely to sting (possibly in an ancient adaptation to forest fire danger). Smoke also disrupts alarm pheromone responses.

My girlfriend bought a package of bees from a local beekeeper back in early April; here they are ready to install in the completed hive. These are ordinary Italian bees from a breeder in the South somewhere. We got two additional packages of fancy northern-adapted bees from Sam Comfort in New York just a couple of weeks ago. It will interesting to compare their comb-building, honey production, temperament and overwintering ability, though three hives is probably not a great basis for judging.  

 

The bees, 10 days after installing in the hive, with the covers off.

 

20 days after installation, the bees are drawing new comb well. I'm experimenting with using foundationless frames (without the usual wax or plastic base to guide comb building). While it is interesting to see what the bees do naturally in the absence of all but very minimal comb guides, I'm getting the impression that it might have been easier to start with foundation. During inspections, there's usually a fair amount of work to do squishing combs back into place and cutting out bits spanning the frames. 

26 days after installation, the queen is laying eggs, brood is being raised, and the first new workers are hatching out. The bees are currently, seven weeks after installation, building up their population fairly well and may be ready for a second hive body later this month. With luck, I may get some goldenrod/aster honey in August or September.

Xerophyta retinervis

Xerophyta retinervis, or “Black Stick Lily,” is a flowering plant from the high-altitude interior of eastern South Africa, with tufts of coarse leaves emerging from a clump of fat stems with a fibrous coat. The stems are often charred by fires in the veld, giving rise to the first part of Xerophyta’s common name. The “lily” part of the name comes from the large cobalt violet flowers that seem to emerge from the stems and open overnight, and always catch me by surprise when they appear in spring. I have hardly ever caught the early stages of flower development, but it is less than a week between no visible flower buds at all and full bloom.

Xerophyta is part of the family Velloziaceae, which is a small, Southern Hemisphere group of monocots (plants like palms or grasses that typically have parallel leaf venation and a single seedling leaf). The Velloziaceae are related to Pandanus, the screwpines, a genus of tropical swamp and coastal trees.

Xerophyta retinervis is poikilohydric, like Myrothamnus, which I wrote about in a previous entry.  That is, it is a “resurrection plant,” which can become completely dehydrated, then soak up water and start growing again when conditions are favorable. In the greenhouse I’ve seen this happen once, accidentally: the leaves curled up and turned yellow, and the plant looked like it was finished, but it perked up again and looked fine a few days after watering.

The desiccation and resurrection process in Xerophyta has been the subject of a certain amount of research, in part because of interest in improving the drought tolerance of crop plants, and it turns out that the leaves actually break down all of their chlorophyll when drying, then rapidly synthesize new photosynthetic pigments when water is available again. In cultivation, it’s probably safest not to test this remarkable ability too much, and keep the plants well-watered during the summer growing period, and barely moist enough to keep the plant from dehydrating in winter. No matter how I treat Xerophyta, it does tend to drop a lot of its foliage in the cooler months.

 References:

Tuba, Z. et al. 1994. Planta 192: 414-420.

Clark, W.D. et al. 1993. Annals of the Missouri Botanic Garden 80: 987-998. 

17th Eastern Cactus and Succulent Conference

The Eastern Cactus and Succulent Conference is coming up next weekend, April 13-15, in Waterbury, Connecticut. It will be an exciting and informative time, but also extremely busy because a) I'm president of the club that is hosting the conference, and b) I'm giving two talks. Maybe I can sneak over to the indoor water park at the conference center to take a break at some point.

Diplosoma luckhoffii, a mesemb in the Mitrophyllum Group.

Talk #1, Saturday afternoon, will be "Other Mesembs." Anyone attending a cactus conference will know at least something about Lithops, the living stones, but there are about 120 (depending on your taxonomy) other genera of succulent plants in the family Aizoaceae. In this presentation I'll try to provide an overview of the succulent Aizoaceae, or mesembs, some familiar but many likely to be obscure to all but the most dedicated specialists.

Pelargonium longifolia, a tuberous species in section Hoarea.

"Succulent Pelargonium" is the topic for my Sunday morning presentation. Pelargoniums suffer form an even more extreme form of the sort of selective fame that afflicts mesembs: everyone with event the slightest knowledge of gardening knows the windowsill geraniums, which are actually hybrid pellies, but there is a whole world of succulent, desert-dwelling Pelargonium species that are little known and rarely cultivated.

I hope to see some of you at the conference! Keep in mind that, while the conference talks and events will be restricted to those who register, there is a succulent plant show and sale that is free and open to anyone, running Saturday and Sunday at the same location in Waterbury.