A Northwoods Almanac for August 21 - September 3 , 2020 by John Bates
Honey!
Mary and I began the adventure of beekeeping with two hives in May. Three-and-a-half months later on 8/16, we extracted 40 pounds of honey, a modest amount, but given how much we learned over the last three months, we felt well-rewarded.
The ecology and democracy of honeybees astonishes us, and no statistic knocks our socks off more than this: for every one pound of honey, honeybees visit two million flowers. So, for our 40 pounds of honey, 80 million flowers were visited. Many flowers were revisited of course, so how many individual flowers this represents is unknown. But consider that this number doesn’t take into account the approximately 50 pounds of honey every beekeeper has to leave in each hive for the bees to eat over the winter. So, “our” bees likely visited at least 100 million flowers this summer so far, and we’re a tiny bee operation.
The average honeybee flies 15 to 20 flights per day and carries back to the hive from one-third to one-fifth of its body weight in pollen every trip, while an average hive contains at least 10,000 bees, and up to 60,000 bees. So, if you do all the math, the two million flower visits/pound figure doesn’t seem so crazy.
In an average hive, 58% of the bees forage just for nectar, 25% forage exclusively for pollen, while the rest collect water, propolis (a glue-like substance secreted by some plants), or bring back a combination of pollen and nectar.
Adult bees only live an average of five to six weeks, three of which are spent initially inside the hive in a variety of roles including being “nurse” bees for emerging larvae, carrying nectar from incoming foraging bees into the hive and pre-digesting it, packing pollen into the hive cells, building the wax comb, capping honey-filled cells, cleaning the hive (carrying dead bees out is just one task), guarding the entrance to the hive against intruders like bumblebees and hornets, and eventually beginning orientation flights so they know where to go to find flowers.
Once a worker bee finally begins its duties as a foraging bee, she only lives for 10 to 21 days, and then dies of old age. We’ve had to get used to the number of dead bees around our hive which at first alarmed us, but now we know it’s just the natural order for them. Wintering bees will live up to six months or more because they don’t have to work so hard or be eaten by predators in the summer.
I would love to be able to analyze our honey and see what flowers became part of it. The literature says bees may visit 200 or more species depending on the availability in an area.
It’s all remarkably complex, and we’re still just scratching the surface in understanding their behaviors. The bees do all the work. If we help them to live in the hives we provide, we get to share (steal might be the better word) some of their summer’s work, and what a sweet reward it is.
Sightings
Very few of us have nesting red-headed woodpeckers on our property, but Greg Bassett in Hazelhurst has had a pair for the last two years. He sent me an update on 8/4: “We now have mom and dad and their two woodpecker contributions to the redhead population. After roundtrip after roundtrip by both mom and dad to our suet feeder for a couple of weeks (or more), they have now brought their babies to the feeder . . . The two babies are as big as the redhead we think is Mom . . . The nest in that tree must have been a very tight fit the last week or so when they all needed to be inside it to stay out of the rain storms. So now we can watch them as they get fueled up for their trip to wherever they go for the winter. Hopefully they will grace us with their presence again next spring!”
Pat Harkin sent me this note on 8/7: “I was sitting in my boat at the dock on Squirrel Lake and had a unique experience with a female hooded merganser . . . It was swimming about 75-100 feet offshore, and it appeared with a dark egg size object in its bill. It proceeded to shake its head vigorously and occasionally the object would fall into the water. It would quickly recapture this object and continue to shake it. It repeated this behavior while swimming closer to shore . . .
“The bird then returned to deep water and again had a large dark brown object in its bill. I asked my wife to retrieve my binoculars from the car to get a better look. With the binoculars I could clearly see that the merganser had a large crayfish in its bill. I then observed that the merganser was holding the crayfish by its legs and shaking it. The merganser then captured the crayfish from the water by the legs and again shook it vigorously until the legs detached. This continued until I couldn’t see any legs or claws on the crayfish, and it tipped its head up, opened its bill, got it in its bill and with difficulty gobbled it down. I could see a large bulge in its throat as it swallowed the legless crayfish. “At 73 years of age and a lifelong hunter, fisherman and trapper, I had never heard of or seen a merganser learn to ‘disarm’ a crayfish meal. I’m curious if you have heard and/or observed anything like this.” I certainly haven’t observed this, but it makes sense to not eat the pincers!
Sarah Krembs in Manitowish Waters sent the following: “We've had a family of pileateds coming to the suet feeder the last few days. There are two very large babies. In the picture where the two are on the tree, the juvenile is on the left. His little red hairdo looks a bit thinner, and that's about the only way you can tell he's still a baby. OTHER THAN THE FACT that he is such a beggar! The babies make this constant sort of raspy grunting noise . . . I finally figured out what they are saying . . . The secret code is: "FEED ME, FEED ME, FEED ME!
“The poor parent is busy filling her [crop] . . . with suet and then the closest baby gets a snack . . . I swear, they are just like human teenagers. They might look like adults, but they sure have a lot to learn about being self-sufficient.”
Angie Fox sent me a great photo of a northern tooth, or shelving tooth, mushroom (Climacodon septentrionale) that she came across while taking a big tree limb into the woods as part of her work at Nicolet College.
Northern flickers are now gathering along roadsides to forage for ants - look for a woodpecker with a white rump in flight.
Common nighthawks have begun their migration. Look for them near dusk flying low and erratically over open areas or along roads. Their long, angled and pointed wings, along with a white bar on the underside of their wings makes for easy identification.
This is the time of year for orbweaver spider webs to be commonly seen in the early morning with the sun pouring through their dewy webs. Due to their poor vision, the orbweavers have to sit in or near their webs to feel their captives caught in their webs. I love seeing their dozens of webs strung every morning in the wetland alders and willows below our house.
Leaves are turning, particularly in flooded wetlands and lakeshores where trees and shrubs have been stressed by high water all summer. Many of the silver maples below our house have already turned red and are dropping their leaves, while numerous alders have apparently died or are in some form of senescence.
Hummingbirds are tanking up at nectar feeders and will soon be migrating, with the males departing well before the females and juveniles. Cornell’s Birds of North America says that “Overland migration of individuals from northern latitudes in North America is nearly synchronous with peak flowering of jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), suggesting this flower is an important nectar source during this time and may influence the timing of migration.” That’s intriguing. We have many jewelweeds in flower all around our property, and the hummers are constantly nectaring in them. I’m curious to see if on our property there’s a correlation between the hummer’s departures and the decline of jewelweed flowers.
Speaking of hummers, Ron Winters sent me a photo of hummers practicing perfect social distancing at 6 centimeters on one of his feeders. Our hummers never cooperate like this, try as we have to teach the males to share and leave everyone alone.
Finally, turtleheads are now in flower in the wetlands, while various species of goldenrod are blooming in the uplands. These are last flowers of summer and the harbingers of autumn.
Weather Stats
July 2020 tied with July 2016 as the second-hottest month ever recorded for our planet, according to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only July 2019 was hotter, but only by a tiny fraction of a degree. “The July 2020 global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.66 degrees above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, tying with 2016 as the second-highest temperature in the 141-year record,” NOAA said.
July 2020 also marked the 44th-consecutive July and the 427th-consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average, according to NOAA.
It was also very warm in the far north, as Arctic sea ice extent for July 2020 was the smallest in the 42-year record, 23% below the 1981–2010 average, according to an analysis by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
It's also the hottest year on record across a large portion of northern Asia, parts of Europe, China, Mexico, northern South America, the Atlantic, and the northern Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Red-eyed Vireos
Now that it’s late August, I think we’ve heard the last singing of red-eyed vireos, the most prodigious songster in the Northwoods. Called the “preacher” bird because of the male’s non-stop, monotonous singing, Bradford Torrey in 1889 had this to say about its speechifying, “I have always thought that whoever dubbed this vireo the ‘preacher' could have had no very exalted opinion of the clergy”.
The adult male begins singing 30 to 35 minutes before sunrise and continues into late afternoon, no matter the heat index, singing up to 85 songs per minute, or an average of about 40 songs per minute. One researcher, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, counted 22,197 songs by a red-eyed vireo over a 14-hour-day. Donald Kroodsma, author of The Singing Life of Birds, writes that only the whip-poor-will sings more songs per minute. Kroodsma counted the songs of one whip-poor-will over a 9-hour-night and estimated he heard 20,898 repetitions of the same phrase, enough to make him feel like he couldn’t get it out of this head the next morning.
Even though red-eyed vireo songs sound pretty much the same to me, individual red-eyed vireos don’t just sing one song - each has a large repertoire of phrases that are used alone or in combinations to form between 20 to 50 songs.
However, by the end of July, the male’s singing usually ceases by late morning, and by now he’s getting ready to migrate at night most often to the Amazon basin of South America flying either around or directly across the Gulf of Mexico.
Celestial Events
On 8/28, look after dusk for Jupiter 1.4 degrees above the waxing gibbous moon. The next night, 8/29, look for Saturn in almost the same spot, but 2 degrees above the moon.
September’s full moon occurs on 9/2, the Harvest/Acorn/Leaves Changing Color Moon.
Thought for the Week
“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.” - Ray Bradbury
Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com.
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