A Northwoods Almanac for 9/15/-28, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for 9/15-28/23   

Yellowjackets!

            If there’s an insect hovering around your soda can or brat this time of year, chances are it’s a yellowjacket. Yellowjackets are actually wasps, and there are 13 species of them in Wisconsin, most distinguishing themselves via their slender shiny bodies with yellow and black banding. 

            Yellowjackets are often mistakenly called bees, but bees can usually be recognized by their densely hairy bodies. Yellowjackets and hornets have less conspicuous and relatively few hairs in comparison.        

            During the spring and summer, yellowjacket colonies send out foragers to collect sugar and protein to support their growing larvae, the worker bees, and the new queens. In particular, yellowjackets search out the sweet secretions of aphids and scale insects, called “honeydew.” They also are predators, hunting for caterpillars, spiders, centipedes, flies and damselflies, among others, to provide the colony with protein, and they’ll also feed on carrion alongside vultures, crows, and eagles. 

            By August, however, the queen quits her egg laying (save for a few) and no longer releases the pheromone that causes the workers to work. Food sources became more scarce, and the workers set out to forage for themselves. Starving, thousands seek out easy to find nectars and sugars, bringing them often into contact with humans. One researcher says, “Yellowjackets use soda and other sweeteners as a sort of ‘aviation fuel’.” 

            The timing couldn't be better for them, or worse for us.

            They can be aggressive and they can sting multiple times without dying, so one trapped in your shirt can wreak havoc. For comparison, when a bee stings, her reverse-barbed stinger works like a fish hook: it goes in but won’t come out, so she only stings once. On the other hand, a yellowjacket can sting again and again.

            The worst thing you can do is try and swat them. The problem is that these workers have their own pheromone, which helps protect the nest from attack earlier in the year, and that's essentially a chemical rallying cry to other workers that the nest is under attack. So, when you swat that annoying wasp and it feels under attack, that rallying cry will go out, and more wasps will start arriving in aggressive mode, ready to defend their nest

            The best advice? Stay calm and cover your food.

            The good news is they don’t last long up here. An early hard freeze kills them (another good reason to stop climate change), all except the queen who finds a snug place to hibernate and waits out the winter before starting a new colony in the spring.

Honey!

            Mary and I extracted honey from our two bee hives on 9/1. It’s an involved process, requiring us to take out ten frames from each “super” (a box on top of the hive base where the queen is excluded so there are no eggs and brood, but the worker bees will still make honey). We have to shake and brush the bees off each frame before we can take the frames over to the manual extractor. We then put the frames into our extractor and spin it by hand at high speed to fling the honey off the frames via centrifugal force and into a stainless steel barrel. 

            Both hives did reasonably well! We got 14 quarts – 3.5 gallons – which weighs around 48 pounds. This is a modest total harvest for two hives, however. In much better bee habitats, and if we were better beekeepers, we might get three times that amount. 

the honey harvest in Manitowish

            In September, the trick now becomes to help the bees make it through the winter. We leave two “deeps” (brood boxes) in each hive. Each deep is loaded with honey – about 70 pounds worth. So, the bees have somewhere around 140 pounds of their own honey in each hive to feed on to get them through the winter. 

            Nevertheless, we will soon start feeding the bees sugar water so that they don’t eat too much of their own honey before winter sets in, and thus starve if we have a late spring. 

            We’re hoping both hives make it to May, and we have an earlier “spring,” such as it is, than we had this year.

            We’re still learning. When all is said and done, we’re really not much more than landlords for the bees. We provide a safe home for them, but they do all the work, and we get some of their honey as a rent payment.

 

Wild Rice

            As is normal, the rice is good this year on some lakes and rivers and absent on others. Rice goes through an average cycle of one good year, two modest years, and one bust year, and every lake and river is on a different schedule within this general cycle. 

            Off reservation, around 60,000 pounds of green rice is harvested every year in Wisconsin, with the finished rice ending up a little less than half of that.

            Note that the “wild rice” you see advertised in gas stations and supermarkets for around $4 a pound is cultivated farmed rice, not true wild rice harvested from our lakes and rivers. Up until 75 years ago, only true wild rice could be purchased or harvested. But in 1950, the first cultivated rice was grown in Minnesota, and by 1958, that one acre had grown to 120 acres. Soon, the University of Minnesota began breeding new strains that were more easily harvested by large combines, and by 1975, 18,000 acres were being farmed in Minnesota.

            California farmers got into the act in 1977, even though the region was far outside of the natural range of wild rice, and by 1986, California passed Minnesota in commercial wild rice production.

            Bringing us up to current times, California now grows 90% of all the commercial wild rice in the U.S. 

            So, check your labels if you want to buy true wild rice, though labeling  is very inconsistent, and producers don’t have to say whether the rice is cultivated or not. 

            The easiest way to know if you’re buying true wild rice? It should cost you $12 to $15 per pound and be hard to find. 

 

Lapland Longspurs

            Our best bird sighting of the last couple weeks was a flock of Lapland longspurs on the dikes at Powell Marsh. They’re notable because they breed across vast areas of the Arctic, where they are often the most visible and abundant bird, and sometimes the only nesting songbird. They’re primarily a seed eater, though they also forage for invertebrates. They frequent prairies, open fields, grain stubbles, shores, and any open ground where they have access to seeds. We only see them as they pass through here to their winter grounds, which are wherever they can find little to no snow on open, weedy ground.  

lapland longspur range map

 

Leaf Change: Coming Soon To A Forest Near You

            I should know better than to try and predict our fall colors, but our dry spring and summer, and last year’s relative dryness, has led to many forests being stressed. And that leads me to believe we’ll have early colors and an early leaf fall. 

            Hal Borland in his book Twelve Moons of the Year writes about this time of year:

“September is more than a month, really; it is a season, an achievement in itself.  It begins with August's leftovers and it ends with October's preparations . . . In the goldenrod's gleaming glory is the certainty of greater glory in birch and maple and aspen. Scattered bursts of flame in the sumacs light fires that will spread to woodbine and swamp maple and dogwood and chokeberry. Asters frost the roadsides, reminders of frosty mornings ahead, and milkweed floss and thistledown are glinting reminders of chill, misty dawns to come . . . The green urgency is past, its ripeness almost complete. Even the days and nights near their time of balance as we approach the equinox and harvest moon. Deliberate September, in its own time and tempo, begins to sum up another summer.” 

 

Beaver Creek Hemlocks

            To celebrate the protection of old-growth forests, Beaver Creek Hemlocks in Springstead was inducted into the national Old-Growth Forest Network (OGFN) on September 7, 2023. By joining the national registry (the 7th in Wisconsin to do so), this special property connects people of all generations to the beauty of and history behind old-growth forests. The registry not only builds a network of the nation’s oldest forests, but also an alliance of people who care about them.

Beaver Creek Hemlocks Dedication

            The Northwoods Land Trust (NWLT) purchased the property in 2021 from the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL). In the 1800s, the federal government granted Wisconsin millions of acres of land to be held by BCPL. Most of the land was sold and the proceeds created the School Trust Fund to support public education.

            BCPL still owns widely scattered parcels. Some have been sold or traded to other conservation agencies and organizations such as NWLT because they are not compatible with BCPL’s forest management directive. 

            In recent years, NWLT has worked with BCPL to identify parcels of interest, many containing remnant pieces of old-growth forests. The Beaver Creek Hemlocks and Sack Lake Hemlocks in Iron County are two of NWLT’s acquisitions that were original BCPL lands. They conserve a rare feature of Northwoods biodiversity, our old-growth hemlock forests.

 

Celestial Events

            On 9/16, look just after dusk low in the west for Mars right below the waxing sliver moon.

            The official autumn equinox occurs on 9/23 when the sun rises nearest due east and sets nearest due west. As of 9/26, nights start to become longer than days, the first time since March 17.

            On 9/26, look after dusk in the southeast for Saturn 3° above the waxing gibbous moon.

 

Quote for the Week

            “Solitude isn’t where you find yourself necessarily, but where you find everything else.” – Author unknown