Autumn Sugar Maple

The fall colors are probably about as good as they're going to get this weekend, in northeastern Connecticut. As usually seems to happen, we've had a stretch of grey, stormy weather as the leaves have been changing, which dulls the colors and knocks the leaves down early, but there have been some nice displays and occasional dry afternoons on which to enjoy them. This is a fantastic open-grown sugar maple at the top of the hill in Storrs Cemetery, which is looking like it would be very productive to tap in the spring. Sugaring season is only four months away!

Bee Season Wrap-up

 Honeybee in the field gathering autumn pollen and nectar from goldenrod. 

The bees are in the middle of their final burst of autumn activity, frantically storing the honey that they'll eat to keep warm all winter. In recent weeks, if the weather has been halfway decent, they've been out in the local fields, swamps and roadside clearings working various asters and goldenrods. I've also been feeding them sugar syrup, just to be certain they have enough stores to get through the cold weather. They're not going to have enough honey surplus for me to swipe any for my own use this year, but that's not unexpected, as they were starting their colonies from scratch, without any wax combs or food. According to the local beekeepers, it was a fairly mediocre year for bees in any event.

 Inspection time in the apiary.

Nevertheless, the girls seem to have done pretty well in their first summer. By June, the three packages I started out with had built up to healthy colonies, and two were building queen cells, making new queens probably in preparation for swarming, where the old queen leaves to found a new colony. I was able to forestall swarming by splitting off some frames of brood with queen cells to start two new colonies. 

Queen bee (at center) laying eggs. 

Above is the new queen raised by one of the splits from June, after she had flown out to mate and returned to start raising more bees. This particular queen seemed to do OK at first, but then produced a fairly spotty brood pattern (missing a lot of cells when laying eggs on a comb), and I suspect that after a couple of weeks the bees gacked her and raised a replacement in a process called supersedure. One of the original colonies also seems to have undertaken a supersedure midsummer, so there was a fair amount of bee drama. They seem to have sorted everything out now, though. 

Northern-raised queen from Anarchy Apiaries.

The apiary, now with five colonies, is in good shape to make it over the winter. All of the hives have quite a few heavy frames of honey. Three of them are from hardy northern stock from an apiarist in upstate New York who breeds for productive, disease and mite-resistant bees. The other two colonies were from generic southern-raised Italian bees, but they both raised new queens over the summer and the mixed colors and patterns of their offspring indicate that they probably bred with some of the northern drones. I'm feeling pretty confident going into the cold season, and am excited to see what has survived come skunk cabbage season (the earliest pollen source) during thaws in late February.

Some of the dark northern bees coming and going from the hive.

Tropical Succulents Talk

Myrmecodia platytyrea ssp. antoinii, an epiphyte from Southeast Asia with a symbiotic relationship with ants.

At next month's meeting of the Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society, I'll be giving at talk about "Tropical Succulents." I'll be covering plants that grow in dry microhabitats in otherwise moist tropical forests, which sometimes have well-developed water storage tissues. Most of these rainforest succulents are epiphytes that grow without soil, clinging to branches high in the treetops. I'll have examples of myrmecophytes (ant-house plants) like Hydnophytum and Myrmecodia, orchids, jungle cacti like Rhipsalis and Selenicereus wittii, some unusual peperomias and hoyas, and others.

The meeting will be at Lauray of Salisbury, which will have a wide array of interesting succulents, begonias and orchids on sale. The trip through the Litchfield hills to Lauray should be nice in early October, too; I'd expect the fall foliage to be near its peak.

Mansfield Connecticut Tornado?

The eastern end of the worst of the possible tornado damage. Photo from August 29, 2012, the day after the storm. Attention, Nipmuck Trail crews! 

I was out of town for the big thunderstorms on Tuesday morning, but when I returned in the afternoon there had been an inch or so of rain, and some boards and buckets around the yard were blown over. I didn't think much more about it until Wednesday evening, when a walk in the nearby woods revealed an area of trees that had been knocked down or had their crowns snapped off.

The worst destruction is in a more or less circular spot, perhaps 200 feet across, just west of the Lion's Club Memorial soccer field. Some very large trees were uprooted, including a really beautiful old Eastern White Pine with a trunk a good three feet in diameter. Within the circular blowdown, the trees seem to have been mainly knocked outwards from the center, and every mature tree was wrecked. The destruction continues in a more subdued fashion to the east, where some branches were down and blown out into the soccer fields, and to the northwest, where there were scattered broken branches and downed trees in a path stretching to Chaffeeville Road, about half a mile away.

 The view into the center of the windthrow.

There doesn't seem to have been any news coverage of wind damage in Mansfield. The downed trees were confined to a wooded part of town that is mostly state park land and UConn research forest, and it doesn't seem that any houses or power lines were hit. The worst of it happened out of sight of the roads. I wonder what exactly happened: was it a tornado or microburst? Or maybe a mini-Tunguska blast? ;) Where would you even report something like this?

The soccer fields got away with fairly minor disruption, although this spot is not more than 500 feet or so from the heart of the blowdown.

Epithelantha micromeris

Epithelantha micromeris ssp. micromeris in fruit in June. 

Epithelantha micromeris is a button-sized cactus clad in a dense covering of white spines and hairs, native to the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. Its flowers are vanishingly small and pallid, and easy to overlook. The clusters of toy-store Barbie-aisle pink fruits that follow in late spring and early summer, however, are hard to miss. In The Cactus Family, Edward Anderson relates some weird ethnobotanical lore associated with E. micromeris, including the notion held by the Tarahumara people that it can grant a long life and the ability to see sorcerers.

My four-year-old plants, grown from seed from Mesa Garden, are flowering and fruiting this year for the first time. This plant material was originally collected in Mesa Garden's home town of Belen, New Mexico, which is the northern limit of the range of E. micromeris subspecies micromeris. Epithelantha plants grow only in soil derived from limestone, in crevices and among limestone rubble, where the ghostly pale plants are well-camouflaged. I visited the Epithelantha locality in Belen in the mid-1990s, but was unable to locate any plants. Possibly they were just well-hidden, but I suspect that collectors, aggravated by cattle grazing, have seriously impacted or extirpated the population.