Pine Barrens Today

 

I had a long walk in the New Jersey pine barrens today. I was hoping to find early-blooming pink lady's slipper orchids, but it really is too early for them, so I found none.  I did find a pink dogwood tree reflected in a pond. Click to enlarge.

And I found luxurious mats of fresh green sphagnum moss.

And long dangling oak tree flowers.

This painted turtle was sitting by the path, sunning itself.

Picked it up very gently and carefully for a picture, supporting the lower shell.

Took a peek underneath. See the red details!

Then put it back where it had been. Note the sleek shiny shell.

 A pink dogwood tree and a lilac bush posed for a photo. 

Carpenter bees were humming around the lilacs.

And another typical pine barrens thing -- signs of abandoned industry. It's been a long time since the last train came down these rails.

Blueberry Buds

 

The flowers on my blueberry bushes are little bundles of spring-colored buds right now. I know they are lovely when they are fully open, when bushes are covered in white bell-shaped blossoms, but I have never before noticed how beautiful they are before they open. Very pretty. Click to enlarge.

Before you know it, carpenter bees will be hanging under them, taking nectar.

Then this.

And, of course, there will be blueberry jam.

Yum.  

But right now, there are bundles of spring-colored buds on my blueberry bushes.

Blueberry Robber

I learned something interesting about the eastern carpenter bee, Xylocopa virginica. I was walking in the woods in south Jersey in a place near blueberry farms where lots of blueberry bushes grow wild in the understory. There were also lots of carpenter bees hovering around every wooden structure I passed that day; no doubt recently emerged from their overwintering chambers. Some of the bees were visiting blueberry flowers. No surprise there -- who wouldn't want some delicious blueberry flower nectar?                                Click to enlarge.  

Looking closer, you can see the famous white face of a male eastern carpenter bee. Click on this sentence to go to an earlier blog of mine that describes the carpenter bee's life cycle.  Carpenter bees are coming out of their winter homes right now, just as the blueberry bushes are flowering. Great timing! 

I found later that carpenter bees are famous for “robbing" blueberry flowers of nectar. They call it robbing because instead of sticking their heads in and getting covered with pollen, carpenter bees make slits in the sides of the flowers and go straight to the nectar at the base. In the picture above you can see some of these vertical slits on the flowers. Signs of bee robbery! And it doesn’t stop there. Honeybees come to the slits and take nectar. It’s not a total loss for flowers, though, because some pollen gets transferred.

You can click on this sentence to read the abstract of a paper in which it was experimentally demonstrated that the pollen transferred in about three robbery style visits equals that transferred by a blueberry pollinator doing it the conventional way. The study also found that carpenter bee robbery might actually be beneficial because of the large number of honeybees it attracts to the flowers.