The Grand Finale to a Great Purple Martin Season

After an initial rough start to the 2018 season due to some unanticipated moves by the GHO, I was able to finish the year with a total of 76 pair and we fledged 360 young.

Kicking off this season with a warmer-than-usual Spring, many of my adult pairs were able to get started with nest-building and egg-laying in parallel during the same 2 weeks. This resulted in many, many nests fledging simultaneously from July 3rd through July 14th, with hundreds of martins returning in the evening, filling the arms on the gourd racks.

The new fledging tree behind my house held dozens of newly-fledged martins. As I watched them every day, I worried that the hawks would be drawn to such easy prey, but it never became a problem The tippy-top of this tree is easily 100 feet tall and the new fledges were able to drop and gain speed quickly. They were safer up there than they were on the top perch rods on my gourd racks.

The young fledges demanded food from whomever came flying in, whether it was one of their brothers & sisters or not.

After watching over the young fledges roosting on the arms for several nights and wondering if I was making a mistake by allowing them to roost there, it became apparent the owl had either tried & failed to broach the nets beneath, or wasn't quite sure she could keep from getting tangled in the ropes. Either way, the netting was the final touch to my cages this year that allowed for a nice balance of allowing the martins to escape during a hawk attack, but also kept the owl out (see this post from June, that was the reason I had to install the netting: http://kathyfreeze.blogspot.com/2018/06/nest-checks-new-hatchlings-and-nets.html)

This was the first year in my 12 years of hosting purple martins that I've had this many fledges returning every night.  It was also the first year, the new fledges have been able to safely roost all night on the gourd arms of my racks - protected from raccoons, snakes, and owls.

This was also the first year in the last 5 years of dealing with the GHO where I've felt I have created the best balance between providing protection for the martins and coexisting with both a GHO and a Barred owl.

Instead of the usual fretting, worrying and anxiety, this year was filled with the sheer joy of seeing so many healthy young'uns on the rails and in the surrounding trees.

I'm glad I never gave up the fight and surrendered, because now, I have a lot of experience with what does and does not work when you have to contend with owls.

June & July Summer Blooms

As I looked through my SD cards in my camera today, trying to clean them off, I realized that I had taken a lot of native wildflower pictures.  Every year, I try to document via pictures all the wildflowers that are blooming each month, so that I can see the progress we're making. There are several that do very well here and, in spite of the very hot, dry weather we've had, they are at least daring to spread their petals and square off with the intensely hot sun.

Late June Bloomers
These were planted in December, 2014.  They did okay, in 2017 but at the end of June this year, my gray-headed coneflowers were kickin' it in the west savanna area.

Gray-headed coneflowers

Black-eyed Susans

Virginia Mountain Mint

Butterfly Milkweed (bloomed from June through July)

Ox-eye Sunflower

July Bloomers

The heat intensified in July, but still, the wildflowers were determined.

Lobelia

Royal Catchfly (red) and Black-eyed Susan

Even more Gray-headed coneflowers bloomed in July

Ladino clover seems to love the heat

Queen Anne's lace (wild carrot)

And 4 years after planting - looky, looky who showed up!!  Royal Catchfly - there were 4 plants this year (also planted in the Savanna with the Gray-headed coneflowers).

The Partridge pea started blooming in early July, but has really been showing off since the last week of July into August.

Partridge Pea

Of all the blooming flowers I thought the honeybees would love, the sumac was not even on my list! But, turns out sumac is one of their favorites here.  So, I guess I'll let it stay.

Smooth Sumac - only 1 of 2 flowers on this page that the honeybees seem to really like.

Rose Pink

The Rattlesnake Master is spreading like crazy - it has basically taken over my specimen garden, ousting most of the coneflower varieties there and only the prairie blazing star is hanging on. Since it's a native wildflower and all kinds of bees and butterflies love it, I'm not going to try to stop it. It's too hot to try to fight it. The clever prairie blazing star has managed to spread to other parts of my field, so it has figured out how to outrun the rattlesnake master.

Prairie Blazing Star in a field of Rattlesnake Master.

Wild Quinine

Turns out, the most favorite plant on my property for the Bumblebees have been all the St. John's Wort bushes I've planted.  They are crazy about it...unfortunately, the Japanese beetles are too. *sigh*
Interestingly, I haven't found one honeybee on the St. John's Wort and the Bumblebees are enjoying a pollen Bonanza!

St. John's Wort

I have a lot of favorites, but Wild Bergamot scores in the list of my top-five.

Wild Bergamot

Trumpet vine

We plant a LOT of red clover - the Bumblebees love it and the Honeybees don't use it (due to the difference in the length of their "tongues").  Guess who just bought 50 more lbs. of red clover? Heh!

Red Clover - Bumblebees LOVE it!

Common Milkweed and Wood Sage

Bindweed - the flowers are open in the morning, but close up when the temperatures start rising.

Ironweed (with Queen Anne's Lace in the foreground)

Prairie  Fleabane

This picture doesn't do the wildflowers justice - Wild Quinine, Queen Anne's Lace, Coneflowers, Sumac and Prairie Blazing Star are just a few of the predominant native wildflowers you can see here (click on the picture to get an enlarged view - that's true for all of them).

July - Wild Quinine dominates, but it will soon retreat and another will come up to carry us into Fall.

Passion Flower

Wood Sage

Lastly, a few of which we're not sure

Wild Potato Vine?

Well, I have searched & searched and we thought the vine & flowers in the picture to the left were either a variety of Morning Glory, or "Redvine"; but the best online site I can find calls it "Wild Potato Vine"

UPDATED 8/15 - Thanks to Chuck Yetter & his wife, these have now been *correctly* identified -  they're called "wild petunias". 

A field of wild petunias - you're welcome, Chuck!  :-)

Field full of "wild petunias".

Out of all the flowers above, the only ones I've found that my honeybees really like are the Butterfly milkweed and the Smooth Sumac.  I've been searching all my August blooming flowers and haven't been able to find from where my honeybees are getting their pollen and nectar stores for the Fall.  Today though, my investigation may have identified their source.  Stay tuned....pictures and details are forthcoming!

Practicing My Beekeeping Skills

Usually I have the luxury of time when I'm deciding whether I'll engage in a new hobby or not. But the honeybees that showed up in my wood duck box have forced me to take a very different and, for me, an uncomfortable path with this new beekeeping hobby.
I've had to engage in a lot of retro-active-learning; reading, watching You-Tube videos and spending a bit of time performing real-time observations.  Not that I'm opposed to any of the activities above, but the point is, I've had to rush through it all.  Everything I decide to undertake, I prefer to make sure I know the majority of what I need to do before I'm actually doing it - evaluate at least most of the risks and then I will charge full-steam ahead.  But not when it comes to the lives of the animals for which I'm charged here. The stakes are too high if you fail in that 'hobby'.
Knowing that I needed to check my honeybee hive soon, I finally decided that yesterday (August 4th) was THE day.  I had been meaning to call my mentor, Calvin, and ask him if he could come and advise me along the way, but life kept getting in the way, and before I knew it, Saturday was here and I still hadn't called him.  "Suck it up, buttercup", I said to myself, "put on your big-girl panties and go do it".  So, I did.
I had been observing the hive and trying to determine how far along they were in their comb-building.  On July 8th, I had grabbed some video of the front landing area of the hive and then I had quickly peeked inside the top brood box to see what was happening.  I had only pulled one frame and, after seeing nothing much was going on, I quickly closed the hive and retreated.

But yesterday, on Aug. 4th, I was about to get my first lesson in how quickly things can change in 27 days, however.  I setup the video camera on a tri-pod next to the hive (Mr. Freeze still doesn't have a bee suit), to get a video of my first full-fledged bee hive inspection.  I think I made some small missteps along the way (ie, I think I may have over-smoked them), but over all, I didn't wreck anything.  I was able to check frames 2 through 5 and after watching the video below, I realized I forgot to check frame #1.  By the time I got through the 4 frames, in the 93+ degree heat though, I was ready to pass out anyway, so it was good that I stopped when I did. It's so hot & dry here, even the danged ragweed is turning a crispy, golden brown.
I was really glad that Calvin had convinced me to only have 9 frames in these 10-frame bodies - it leaves a lot of extra space for pulling frames out without rolling / crushing the bees.  All the frames I checked had capped brood (I incorrectly called it "capped honey" in the video) and/or larva, and honey dripped out of a few cells when I tilted them! Whoa - they have been BUSY. 
I only found 2 hive beetles on Aug. 4th on my old sticky board and today, Aug. 5th, I found one, and only one varroa mite.  From my amateur assessment, it's apparent, my girls are doing pretty well so far.

By the way, just in case you're looking for the perfect cloth wrap for thoroughly cooking your enemy in the sun, a Harvest Lane beekeeper suit is perfect for that.  Just sayin'.
After viewing the video below, I also realized that I really need someone with me to take close up pictures.  It's hard to convey the thrill of seeing the capped brood, an emerging baby bee and glistening honey in the sun, via words alone.  And I was terrified of moving the frames away from the hive to get closer to the video camera for fear of dropping my queen off on the rocks or in the grass (maybe that's not really something that happens often...fellow beeks?).
Here's my 17 minute- long video, in which I managed to NOT pass out. Maybe next time, I need to strap some ice packs to my body before I go down there.  I swear, my core temp today still feels like it's at 150 deg.  Hehe!

Frames 2 & 3 are pictured below.
You can click on the pictures below for a bigger view also.

A baby bee is emerging in the picture above.

In a Coon's Age

This year I planted purple hull peas in my garden.  I had used the last of the fresh-frozen bags that my stepfather had given me a few years ago and, after trying the canned peas, I decided I wanted to grow my own fresh peas.  But, I wasn't sure if the climate was right to grow them here in Missouri.
Apparently though, climate change has impacted Missouri in only one positive way - it is now hot enough to indeed grow purple hull peas here...at least as hot as Louisiana. My Mother brought the 'seeds' to me earlier this year and I anxiously waited for the day when I could plant them in our raised beds.  To my surprise, they grew quickly.
This picture was taken on July 2nd. 

By July 16th, they had already put on many, many pea pods.  But as Paw-Paw always instructed, they're not ready until they turn purple!

After a few days of having to focus on my German Shepherd's hip issues, multiple vet visits and totally ignoring my garden, my check on July 22nd surprised me - the purple hull peas were ready, baby!
As I prepared to pick the purple pea pods on Wednesday, July 25th, I remembered what Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw used to tell us - "hold on to that plant stem, girl, when yankin' that pea off".  After all, you didn't want to break the plant when it could still yield more crop!  I brought out a large bowl and surveyed the crop.  As I started to pick them, I thought, "it's been a long time since I shelled and cooked purple hull peas - I wonder if I remember how?" and a flood of long-buried memories welled-up and flooded through my brain, like waves building and crashing over rocks.

I always associate purple hull peas (and okra) with my grandparents - they always had huge - yes, HUGE gardens.  My Grandfather's favorite welcome to infrequent visitors came to the forefront of my mind; "it's been a coon's age since I've seen you"! - and I laughed because - it's been a coon's age since I shelled and cooked these peas too! But I knew I loved them and that's why I grew them this year.  As I picked and picked, I thought of the many hours my sister, brother and I spent as kids in the huge fields alongside Maw-Maw & Paw-Paw, complaining & whining about picking ACRES - yes, ACRES of those peas, okra and all kinds of garden goodies, which we didn't call "goodies" at the time - we were kids and didn't think the same way then.

Kathy, Karen and Clint - 3 troublemakers

No one could shell peas like Maw-Maw.  Even Paw-Paw held second place to her shelling skills.  Maw-Maw would gather everyone in a circle with their own bowl and set the foot-tub, full of peas, in the middle.  Even if you were just visiting, you got a bowl and you helped shell peas.  Maw-Maw always had food on the table or in the fridge and she loved to cook.  But people weren't allowed to be free-loaders.  Somehow, in her own kind way, she let people know they had to contribute and they always did.  I never learned to shell peas as well as she did - her fingers could move ten times faster than mine and still carry on a conversation with whomever was in the shelling circle; "Sister Savada", she'd say, "how's uncle so-&-so", or "did you hear about so-&-so", etc., etc.  And she never missed a beat and always ended up shelling more peas than the rest of us.

Maw-Maw & Paw-Paw

My bowl of peas was small in comparison to the harvests we used to get out of their fields, but still, I hadn't done this in a long time.

As I began to tear them open though, to my surprise, muscle memory took over and even though my brain hadn't caught up yet, my fingers knew exactly what to do and working together, we shelled & shelled as the peas plinked in a satisfying rhythm into my bowl.  Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought of all the times I complained about doing this very thing, when I'd much rather be out riding my horse or jumping out of the hay barn. I didn't realize then how valuable that time with my Grandparents really was.  I ended up with 7 cups of shelled peas for my first harvest, and along with a pone of cornbread, Mr. Freeze also enjoyed them, although, I think the cornbread is his most favorite part.
Funny how a garden vegetable can bring back so many memories. Memories that I hadn't thought of in years.  I thought I had forgotten a lot of things that my Grandparents had taught me, but it turns out, your ancestors have influenced a lot more than you realized - and there's a lot more ingrained in your muscles, your personality and your brain than we know....until one day you go out to pick the peas that your grandparents grew on their farm a long, long time ago.