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By Root 1335 0

thousands of bees at any one time, and on this day it fairly rained yellow droplets continuously. I cleared five 1-square-foot sections of snow and found 80, 95, 94, 102, and 160 fresh droplets collected on them, respectively, in just thirty minutes. There were almost no dead bees on the snow. Bees repeatedly landed on the snow, but they all got up to fly again. Most bees vanished from sight before again returning. They were foraging. They were seeking flowers, and the wind-pollinated trees from which they gather a major pollen crop bloom early. The poplars and red maples open their blossoms in late March. No other pollen is then available, but I counted up to 154 bees laden with poplar pollen returning to one hive per minute on the day after the poplars first bloomed, and when winter was not yet over. (There are then still frequent nightly frosts, and in 2002, the next year, a storm dumped six inches of snow on April 22, three weeks after the poplars had finished blooming.) The bees’ sacrifices paid off. All the colonies survived the winter, issued swarms, and made near-record amounts of honey that spring and summer.

24

WINTER BUDS

By the end of January, those of us who live in the Northeast have been looking out on starkly bare trees for three months. “Only four more months,” we think, before the buds break and trees are again resplendent in green. The wait is all the more difficult when you realize that the buds are there all winter, biding their time. Indeed, they were fully formed on the trees the previous summer, long before the shows of brilliant fall foliage.

A bud can consist of bare clusters of miniature leaves harboring a new shoot (as in hickory and butternut); an embryonic flower or inflorescence (as in alder, hazelnut, and birch); or both incipient leaves and flowers encased together under protective scales (apple, cherry, shadbush). The large buds of mountain ash and poplars have a sticky, resinous covering that helps protect them from hungry animals. All leaf and flower buds are packed with nutrition and are prized winter food for many northern herbivores. Ruffed grouse live all winter on aspen and birch buds, and I’ve watched purple finches devouring sugar maple flower buds. I’ve seen red squirrels decapitate almost all the young balsam fir trees in some patches to eat the large terminal shoot buds. In the tops of mature fir trees they snip off hundreds of terminal twigs to eat the twenty or more flower cone buds on each one like corn from a cob, as shown in the figure on page 44. Then they discard the twig, which drops onto the snow below. Moose break off branches of poplar saplings and of red and striped maple to feed on the terminal buds and twigs. In some patches of my woods in Maine, I can hardly find a single sapling that is untouched by moose, deer, or snowshoe hares.

Red maple shoot with deer browse and an empty sawfly cocoon.

A twig of mountain ash that has been browsed off by hares three years in succession.

Buds vary greatly in size, and it is primarily the trees of northern regions that have large buds. Southern transplants to the north, such as black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) and honey locust (Gleditsia trichanthos), have only miniscule buds.

For large-budded northern trees, the prepackaging of leaves and flowers into buds must have some advantages that outweigh the considerable cost of maintaining buds for so long before they are activated. I suspect the main benefit of having the leaves and flowers preformed all winter is for a quick start-up in the spring—the buds are ready to break out quickly on cue, thereby allowing the tree to make the most of a short growing season. In New England, trees have only three short months in which to produce leaves—their photosynthetic machinery—and then use them to make anenergy profit. When the long-awaited spring finally arrives in the north, it does so suddenly. Over a week or two, the ice and snow melt, and the bare ground begins to absorb heat. In only three or four days in mid-May, a bare beech forest is crowned with a