Plants Have Families Too.

Grouping items that share characteristics helps us organize them.

Plant taxonomy (or the study of plants and their scientific names and categories, such as Family) is a huge subject with vast amounts of information, including a lot of scientific information that is not visible to the naked eye, which most of us will never learn. Many of us are interested in wildflowers as we see them blooming, and what we want to learn is their common names. I've never taken plant taxonomy, but there are some general characteristics of some families that help me know what group a plant belongs to, and that makes it easier to identify a plant, because most field guides are arranged by family. At times I look up a flower in a book that is grouped by color, but find it much harder to find the one I'm looking for. I find that the author's idea of the color group a plant belongs to is frequently not the same as mine, plus there is a lot of color variation in many species.

Let me introduce you to three plant families. All three have lots of flowers in our area that belong to each of these families, and their characteristics are pretty obvious.

DAISY FAMILY (Asteraceae)
is a huge family and the example below is one of the best known and most easily recognized.

Firewheel or Indian Blanket (Gailardia pulchella) frequently produces massive displays in fields and along roadsides in Central Texas. The brightly colored flower-heads are 1 1/2" to 2" across and the red ray flowers are tipped with yellow.

This illustration was drawn by me (as Margaret Campbell) in 1990 for A Field Guide to Wildflowers Trees & Shrubs of Texas by Delana Tull and George Oxford Miller, Gulf Publishing, Houston Tx, 1991. It shows a flower head and a cross section of a typical head of a flower in the Aster Family. Many flowers in other families are single flowers, whereas in the Aster Family a head is made up of multiple flowers which can be divided into disk flowers in the center and ray flowers around the outside.

Parralena (Dyssodia pentachaeta) is a low plant 2 to 8 inches tall that is found on dry caliche roadsides here on the ranch. The flower heads are 1/4" to 1/2" in diameter, and bloom from spring to fall. Their leaves, which are very thin, but numerous, are aromatic; you can rub them between your fingers, and then sniff your fingers.

Black-Foot Daisy (Melampodium leucanthum) blooms all through the Texas summer. Their flower heads are 3/4 to 1 1/4 " wider with white ray flowers and yellow disk flowers. The base of each ray flower has a black dot near the point where it meets the disk flowers, and is the reason it is called "Black-Foot" daisy.

Skeleton Plant (Lygodesmia texana) looks leafless and therefore has the name Skeleton Plant. It stands 10 to 24 inches tall with only a few branches and grows on dry, rocky ground. The pink to lavender flower heads are 1 1/2 to 2 inches in diameter. Each head has 8 to 12 ray flowers and no disk flowers. In the flower center are the anthers (male) and styles (female) of the 11 ray flowers. They can bloom from April to August.

The MILKWEED FAMILY (Ascelpiadaceae)
contains plants that make life possible for the Monarch and other "milkweed" butterflies. Their caterpillars eat milkweed plants that contain cardiac glycosides and those make the Monarchs poisonous to many birds both as larvae and adults. Their bright colors of orange and black (yellow and black as caterpillars) advertise that they are poisonous. Many of the insects that eat milkweeds, or suck their sap, are brightly colored too.

This milkweed is called Antelope Horns (Asclepias asperula) and is common from March to May in the Hill Country. The rounded inflorescence (flower cluster) at the end of each stem is composed of numerous pale yellowish-green flowers. Their flowers are 5-merous (5 of each part) and they contain the milky latex that bleeds out if the surface of a leaf or stem is broken. Each flower is from 3/8 to 5/8 inch wide. Note that in the enlargement (click on picture) there are two brightly colored bugs that are common on milkweeds.

Antelope Horns fruit. The reason this plant is called antelope horns may be due to the long fruits which look like a horn. The seeds emerge when the fruit splits. Each seed is attached to a mass of silky hairs.

This milkweed came from a plant nursery and is usually called Tropical Milkweed (Asclepias sp.) I am including it because it is easy to distinguish the yellow carona (a crownlike appendage in the form of a fringe, cup, or tube in the center of a flower) from the orange carolla (the inner whorl of a flower, the petals collectively, which are often colorful) and in this case the carolla is partially curled back. Tropical Milkweed is a good plant to have, if you'd like to raise Monarch caterpillars.

Texas Milkweed (Asclepias texana) is a very pretty plant. It lives on caliche outcrops, and at Selah we also find it growing along Miller Creek near Madrone Lake. Flowers occur in clusters and each flower has its carona on top with curled down carollas.

This interesting vine is in the Milkweed Family and when I first saw it along the drive to our house, I got out my book by Marshall Enquist, "Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country" (you can buy this at the LBJ Wildflower Center), and looked in the Milkweed Family section of the book. There it was, Wavy-Leaf Milkweed Vine (Sarcostemma crispum). Its flowers normally hang straight down and are easily missed.

Wavy-Leaf Milkweed Vine (Sarcostemma crispum) flowers up close. The inside of the flowers have the 5 merous parts, but I couldn't get into a position to take a picture.

Evening PRIMROSE FAMILY (Onagraceae)
flowers are 4-merous, and the ones featured in this blog all have 4 yellow petals.

The Stemless Evening Primrose (Oenothera triloba) is a low ground hugging plant that opens in the late afternoon just before dark from March to May. When I was getting ready to take this picture a sphinx moth popped into my view as it quickly took a drink of nectar from the flower on the right, and I was so startled I not only didn't get a picture of it, I dropped my camera in my lap.

Square-Bud Primrose (Calylophus Berlandieri) is common in the Hill Country, and it can be counted-on to make some good shows, even in dry years like this one. The yellow flowers are about 2 inches wide, and have a black throat and a black stigma which extends well past the stamens. In this picture there is a bug in the throat of the flower, but I can't tell what it is. Note that directly under the flower is a bud and you can see the square shape of it.

In this photo you can see both black throated and yellow throated flowers.

Fluttermill (Oenothera macrocarpa) is an amazing flower which is not common, but every year we see one or two blooming in May. They grow out of a dry caliche bank and the flowers are up to 3 1/2 inches across. This one has very little stem.

All photographs were taken by Margaret Bamberger, many of them recently, some last spring. I hope you find this blog interesting. Please feel free to comment, and if you don't want your comment published, just let me know as part of your comment. Questions are welcome too.

Bees and Beekeepers at Selah, Bamberger Ranch

History of bee keeping at BRP. 

Several staff members working at the Bamberger Ranch were bee-keepers in the 80's and 90's. Buddy Francis became very allergic to bee stings and had to quit working around bees. Randy Lenz continued for many years.  Each year a number of small jars of honey were labeled with the Selah logo and given to guests by David as presents. 

When Randy and Buddy were both gone, the hives became inactive.  Colleen Gardner (then Colleen Lyons) came on board in 1999, and she decided to learn the art of beekeeping, and thus a new chapter in Selah bee keeping began. Colleen read about bees, their natural history, and the history of bee-keeping. She went to bee-keepers meetings to learn about bee hives, the proper gear for a person to wear when working with bees, and how to build hives, frames and install beeswax foundation. She found two wonderful people, Chuck and Sandy Wohl, who were willing to come to the ranch to help Colleen get first-hand experience with putting new bees in a hive, and handling a bee colony when checking their hive. Finally she learned how to take frames laden with honey and extract the honey so that we could again have "gift" jars of honey. 

In 2003 Steven Fulton, a biologist, joined the teaching staff and Colleen taught him beekeeping. This year in January Justin Duke, who graduated from Texas State in geography was hired to work with the teaching staff, and is now learning about beekeeping too. Justin's fiance Stephanie Tidwell frequently volunteers at the ranch and wants to learn about it too.

Colleen Lyons in 2001 in her bee gear is ready to work on a hive safely. It is important that the protective gear for beekeeping be a light color and cover the body so that skin is not exposed to possible stings.

Colleen learns from Sandy and Chuck about using a smoker to calm the bees before looking at the frames. Bees respond to smoke instinctively by eating honey so they will have food reserves (in case the forest fire burns their hive which is suggested by the smell of smoke), and being full of honey makes them sluggish. 

Some frames are just for honey storage and they are separated from the brood frames by a Queen excluder, which keeps her in the a part of the hive where the bee keeper wants her to lay eggs and raise brood. She is larger than the worker bees which can pass through the excluder, but she is too large. The frame above has both brood in the center and honey cells around the edge, which is the "textbook" brood pattern.

The Queen bee comes with a colored dot on her thorax (near front in middle) from the people who provide packaged bees - a different color for each year. The worker bees are all females that won't be able to lay eggs, but they are vital to the health of the whole hive. They have different jobs starting with keeping the hive clean, raising the brood, and finally collecting nectar for making honey. 

                   

Honey frames have the wax caps removed by running a hot knife over the top of the cells. Then honey can be removed with a special centrifuge.

Colleen and Sandy use the centrifuge to separate honey from frames.

Some wax is in the honey and must be strained out.

Colleen fills jars with the clear and delicious honey.

Sandy and Colleen show off a labeled jar of honey, the end product of a lot of hard work.

Colleen uses the natural history of bees to demonstrate adaptations that both bees and flowers have to accommodate each other. The bees receive nectar and flowers get pollinated, and they are dependent on each other. 

Spring is time to "hive the honey bees".

Package bees should be ordered after the date of the last hard freeze for your region.  The best time of day to hive the bees is in late afternoon. Sugar water can be offered to bees until there are sufficient wildflowers for the bees to forage for themselves.  The new hive can be placed where the sun warms them in the morning so they can get an early start to drink nectar and gather pollen. 

Near the bottom of the picture a brood chamber sits on a cement base hive stand. Behind it is a super which will be filled with honey.

From the top down a hive consists of: 

(1) Hive Cover - with a galvanized covering that hangs over the edge of the top super and protects the hive from bad weather and extreme heat.

 (2) Shallow Super - supers are open at the top and at the bottom so bees can move around freely, with frames fitted with Beeswax Foundation for honey storage. Several can be stacked to increase storage capacity. 

(3)Queen Excluder -is placed between the storage area and where the young are raised. It  keeps the queen in the brood chambers where she lays her eggs (because she is too large to pass though the excluder), and prevents her from laying eggs in the honey storage area. 

(4) Brood Chambers - are the bees living quarters where the queen lays eggs and the brood is raised. Honey is also stored in this area for the bees' food.

(5) Bottom Board - forms the floor of the hive.

(6) Hive Stand- supports the hive off the ground to keep it dry and to insulate the hive.

Stephanie holds the bee "package" which includes a mass of bees inside the screen and a can that is hanging inside (you can't see it in this picture) with a queen bee in a little screened box. The queen produces  a chemical called the "queen substance" that makes her hive smell different from any other hive, and all of her worker bees will recognize their hive and their queen. 

You can see the queen bee inside her box and she has a white dot on her thorax so she is easy for people to see. The worker bees are very interested in her. There is a plug of candy in the end of the queen's box and by the time her workers eat the candy away, they will recognize her as "their queen". She will leave the box and start laying eggs in wax chambers formed by the workers for the hive's brood to be raised in. 

The queen's box is hung in the brood chamber so she'll know where to start laying eggs when she is out.

The rest of the bees are dumped into the super on top.  Justin is holding the brush so they won't fall into the sugar water which is there for them to drink until they figure out where the flowers are.

Justin gently brushes across the top to help them into the spaces between frames. When they are all in the hive the top is placed on it. You can see the inside of the top with galvanized metal on the outside just behind the hive.

Some of the workers stay on the brush and Justin holds it up so I can get a good picture of them.

The hive was set up last Thursday afternoon. When I went to see them today they were moving in and out through the entrance. It appears that they will be a successful hive. However, Colleen and Justin will be checking to make sure that the queen is healthy and laying eggs, and that the workers are taking care of the brood. They will also check to see if honey is being stored. If the weather is very dry, they may put out sugar water to keep them from getting hungry.

I found interesting information on a site about the American Bee Journal that had information about hives and answers to frequently asked questions.

Pictures in the History section were taken by Chuck and Sandy Wohl, Colleen Gardner, and me. Pictures of the hive being set up were taken by me on Thursday, April 24. Last picture was taken April 28.

I hope you found this interesting. If you have questions that you'd like me to answer, send a comment and I'll answer it with an addition to this post.

April's Blooming Trees & Bushes

In mid-April there are blooms on some Hill Country trees:

Yesterday J. David and I went on a flowering tree expedition, with my camera of course. The first three trees featured are in the Rose family and they all have white or pinkish-white blossoms with five petals. The size of the flowers varies and they all have fruit in which the seed(s) are surrounded by flesh, sometimes soft, as in the cherry, or relatively hard, as it is in the Blanco Crabapple and Hawthorn.

ESCARPMENT BLACK CHERRY (Prunus serotina var. eximia):
Some trees you can smell before you see them, and the aroma of the Escarpment Black Cherry flowers is heavenly. They are fairly common on the ranch, and are native to this area. Because the foliage is so tasty to deer that they appear to be in decline. However, if small cherry plants are protected by a corral, a pile of brush, or by virtue of being in a thicket, they do very well. The blooms appear in March or April, and in late summer the fruits ripen, which are purple, round and small (1/4 to 3/8 inch). In the fall their leaves turn bright clear yellow and they offer a beautiful accent to the Central Texas fall landscape.

J. David is enjoying the sweet smell of the spring blossoms of The Escarpment Black Cherry (Prunus serotina var. eximia).

The bark of the Cherry tree has silver and grey bands on the smooth younger branches and the trunk of young trees. On older trees the bark is is is rough and silver to dark grey. In the picture above the tree trunk is on the left and has circular silver and grey bands.

Flowers are small and white. They have 5 tiny petals on a slender center stalk that is 4 to 6 inches long.

HAWTHORN (Crataegus sp.) is a smallish tree that grows in bottomland or in heavy mixed deciduous shrubs and vines where it is protected from browsing deer. Here at the ranch it grows in thickets on the rocky limestone soil on our hilltop(s). There are many species that are difficult to tell apart, and it is uncertain which species we have, thus the scientific name ends with "sp." which means "species" which implies that it's exact identification is unknown.

Hawthorns are small trees or large shrubs, 5 to 16 feet tall. They protect themselves with long very sharp thorns, as are seen on the underside of the small branch in the picture above.

Small clusters of white flowers appear briefly in mid-April. It is amazing how many Hawthorns we see driving around the ranch in the spring when they can be easily recognized by their flowers. They tend to be found in thickets of mixed plants, such as Shin oak, poison ivy, Elbow bush, Rusty Blackhaw, where they are out of reach of Whitetail deer and other browsers.

This close-up shows the five white petals of each Hawthorn flower and the toothed edges of the shiny leaves with parallel veins.

BLANCO CRABAPPLE: (Malus ioensis var. texensis) is another small tree with beautiful pink and white spring blossoms. It is endemic which means that it is found only in a limited area. This tree or shrub, is found only on some limestone soils in Blanco, Kerr and Kendall Counties. Fruit is a hard green apple that can be made into jelly with enough sugar.

J. David is standing under the Texas State Champion Blanco Crabapple.

Susan Sander presented a Champion Tree Certificate to J. David Bamberger on June 3, 2003 for our Blanco Crabapple which is 12 feet tall, has a crown spread of 14 feet, and a trunk circumference of 13 inches. We believe that this is the only Blanco Crabapple that has ever been submitted to the Texas Forest Service, and will remain the champion until someone submits a larger one for the champion tree registry.

This small tree is actually quite old, and because it is slow-growing lichens are growing on its branches in spite of its relatively small size.

Thorns on a Crabapple are less frequent than on a Hawthorn, they can still help provide some protection from herbirvores.

Like other trees in the rose family, its leaves are tasty to deer, and the small plants must either be protected by thicket growth or caged if they are to survive being eaten. This young Crabapple has been corralled for 5 years and this year has a beautiful crown of flowers.

WHITE HONEYSUCKLE (Lonicera albiflora) is in the Honeysuckle Family and is native to our area. Its flowers resemble the common invasive Japanese Honeysuckle from eastern Asia. White Honeysuckle is a bush that has long branches that "climb" when appropriate. Fruit are bright red translucent berries in clusters in the fall.

This bush is blooming and you can see a long climbing branch that arises on the right side of the bush in this picture. It is not attached to anything and was waving in the wind yesterday when I took this picture.

The terminal leaves are joined in the middle to form a collar around the blossom cluster.

TEXAS SNOWBELL, (Styrax platanifolius var. texanus) is a close relative of our Sycamore Leaf Snowbell (Styrax platanifolius) found along the Miller Creek on the Preserve. Texas Snowbell is an endangered variety that is found west of here in the watersheds of the Nueces River and Devils River.

J. David stands in front of the largest Texas snowbell that we have here on the Preserve. It is on the trail and there is a sign so hikers can read about the plant and the project to save them that David, Steven Fulton (ranch biologist) and a group of volunteers have been involved with for years.

On the right side of the picture is a Texas Snowbell. Note that the underside of the leaves have a white pubsence. On the left side is a Sycamore-leaf Snowbell which has flower buds, and the underside of its leaves are a shiny smooth green.

The flowers are bell shaped with a distinctly yellow group of stamen surrounding the pistal. You can see from the white underside of the leaves that this is the Texas Snowbell.

Each year in the spring J. David and a group of volunteers go out to the watersheds where the Texas Snowbells are found, and look for the blooming plants on land owned by cooperating ranchers. It is important to have diverse genetic material to restore the endangered snowbell. In the fall the crew is out again to collect seeds. Seeds are stratified by putting them in a baggie with moist peat moss in a refrigerator for several months until they start to sprout. The sprouts are moved to 4 inch cups that are marked with the watershed name and keep in the greenhouse until it is warm in the spring.

In the fall older plants 6 to 12 inches tall are taken out into the watershed where seeds were collected, and planted with a sturdy corral to protect them from browsers. Each plant is visited in the summer to make sure they are doing well and to be given some water if too dry. The reintroduction program has been funded by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Texas Parks and Wildlife. Jackie Poole, botanist with TPWD, who is in charge of the recovery projects for endangered plants in Texas wrote the recovery plan and assists the group in field work as well as overseeing the project as a whole.

To learn more about endangered plants in Texas see the TPWD website.

The plants featured in this post are not all of the blooming trees now. We saw Golden Ball Lead Trees, Rusty Blackhaws, Pyracanthas blooming this weekend as well.

All photos taken on April 20, 2008, by Margaret Bamberger with a Canon Rebel XTi digital single lens reflex camera, with the exception of Susan Sander giving TFS Champion Tree certificate to J. David, which was taken by Margaret on June 3, 2003.

Reference: Jan Wrede, TREES, SHRUBS, AND VINES OF THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY. A&M nature guide. Texas A&M University Press, College Station. 2005

Marshall Enquist, WILDFLOWERS OF THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY. 1987. A new printing of this wonderful book is now out and can be purchased at the Lady Bird Wildflower Center in Austin. I got their website by Googling Marshall Enquist.