White

Queen Anne's lace

Midsummer is especially lush on Roundtop this year, due the near unending rain.  This past weekend was the first in a month where it didn’t rain and that respite, while it will be short-lived, was much appreciated.  The clear weather allowed me to get some outside work done, but I’m afraid I will never catch up at this rate.

Wildflowers are certainly enjoying the wet summer. They are profuse nearly everywhere I look. I hope the local bees are populous enough to properly pollinate them. I do see some bees, if not nearly the numbers I should be seeing.  Colony collapse disorder apparently took an especially harsh toll last winter and this spring, with losses running about 42% of all colonies.  This comes after a year or so when the losses didn’t appear to be getting any worse, and beekeepers were very cautiously optimistic they could learn to deal with it. So much for that hope, I’m afraid.  This year I can probably count the number of bees I’ve seen on two hands.  That’s more than a little scary.

Butterflies, which also perform pollination duties, seem to be around in normal numbers, so that might help.  Butterflies are far less efficient than bees at pollinating, but at least it’s something. The difference is that butterflies have longer legs than bees, which holds them away from pollen. Bees are built for pollinating and can capture pollen pretty much with their entire bodies.  And of course, bees are busy little things, while butterflies flit prettily and slowly from flower to flower.  One thing butterflies can do that bees can’t is see the color red, so they are very effective pollinators of red flowers.  Butterflies prefer larger flowers with flat or broad surfaces so they can more easily land. A few moths, such as the hummingbird moth, also pollinate but how many of those do you see around?

I’ve been talking about wildflowers and how they are affected by a lack of bees, but that’s really only a side issue.  More than 80 different farm crops in the U.S. depend on pollination.  This covers all of the berry crops as well as apples, cherries, plums, avocados and all the almonds.  The list goes on to cover dozens of food crops. I look for bees every day when I’m out in the woods, but so far there’s little joy in reporting the number that I see.

The summer's snowflake

Oh, how I wish that summer's snowflake

Was as icy and cold as January.

That I could run my fingers over the tiny blossoms

And feel bursts of winter

in the middle of a heat wave.

Summer snowflakes

The summer heat wave continues, and about the only thing that isn’t wilting in this 100F heat are the Queen Anne’s lace blooms, summer’s snowflakes. The heat is just sucking the moisture out of the ground, making a mockery of the too-much rain we had until just a few weeks ago. Here in early July, the forest is as wilted and brown as a bad August.

Last night a local raccoon raided the chickens’ water bottle, updumping it in an effort to get a taste. I keep the water just outside their pen, because they updump it when it’s inside. The raccoon didn’t bother the chickens, only the water. I guess that gives you an idea of how dry everything suddenly is.

The dogs look like deflated balloons, stretched out across the cabin floor. The cats are no better, and neither, I suspect, am I. Still, as much as I dislike this weather, I do find a few upsides to how I put up with it. At work yesterday, the air conditioning went out for a bit, and you’d have thought the world was ending.

Even before the office reached 80 degrees, people were wilting and claiming the conditions were unbearable. That’s when it occurred to me that people who spend their whole lives in controlled climates feel uncomfortable when the temperature varies just a few degrees beyond that controlled level. Someone like me, who lives in an uncontrolled climate, is better able to adapt to wider swings of temperatures and still feel comfortable. Of course, I may find this ability disappears by the time I am elderly. I will worry about that then. For now, let’s just say that an 80-degree office still felt pretty good to me.

I do worry, a bit, if controlling things like a household temperature to within a few degrees all year long is really doing the human species much good. Less than 100 years ago, no one had air conditioning and people survived. Amazing, isn’t it, that today people will complain when the temperature reaches 80?

Summer Snowflake

Queen Anne’s lace is blooming now, another sign of mid-summer here in Pennsylvania. When you get as close for a photo as I did for this one this morning, you can see these are pretty complex little flowers. In my photo, only the flowerets on the outside of the bloom are fully out. The rest are still closed. To me, the close up resembles a snowflake in both its complexity and color.

It’s also a bit like a mandala or, perhaps, nature’s own maze. Whenever you think you’ve seen all there is to see, suddenly there’s another layer to it. Each "flower" is actually made up of many separate tiny stalklets, and on each little stalk is an array of individual blooms. Yet, when I’m not this close. I think of each as a single flower, instead of what must be thousands of little tiny flowers.

Nature’s complexity seems limitless, and even the tiniest and simplest of things is far more complex than we usually notice. But it’s always there, if we take the time to see.