Wood, Wasps, and Seasonal Greetings

With Christmas and New Year taking up the end of December, I have not  done a blog post for a while.

But Happy New Year from me and this tree!

It's a Norway Spruce (Picea abies) which is the traditional Christmas tree, and this one was growing on the lower half of Newtonmore Golf Course.  The lower branches have been pruned to give room for the golfers and the tree then weeps resin. Seeing faces in the trees reminds me of Lord of the Rings and the Ents.

And a friend in New Zealand sent me this picture of a NZ  "Christmas tree", a Pohutakawa which has lovely red flowers at Christmas (their summer) and is festooned with lichens which look very similar to the UK ones.

Pohutakawa

 My son and his wife visited us for Christmas and having extra eyes when out for a walk was useful.  My son spotted this lichen (on a birch tree):

Ramalina fastigiata

It's not one I see often and not usually on a birch as it prefers trees with a less acidic bark.  It's the bushy looking one that's a pale green.  (The blue green lichen surrounding it is a Parmelia, probably Parmelia sulcata, which is very common and covers most of the local trees and hugs the bark quite closely.)

The Ramalina bushy lichen (Ramalina fastigiata) has discs at the end of each branch, that remind me of sink plungers! Maybe it should be called the Dalek lichen.  The discs are the fruiting bodies (apothecia) that produce spores.

Another discovery came when we had to find an extra suitcase in the loft for my son to take the Christmas presents back to Germany!  There was an abandoned wasp nest (byke).  They are amazingly delicate and I'm afraid I broke it before taking a picture.  The outer globe is made of paper which the wasps make from wood pulp. I see them in the summer chewing away at old wood.  The inside is a perfect set of hexagons surrounded by several layers of spherical globes.

 There is more detail at the Natural History Museum. It seems that the queen starts the nest and then when her eggs have hatched into new wasps, they take over the work and she just does the egg laying.

Well, that is what I read, but there is even more fascinating detail on the Countryfile web site

"But aren’t we taught in schools that only queens lay eggs? In fact, workers in almost all Hymenoptera (bee, wasp and ant) colonies can lay eggs. Because of a genetic quirk of the Hymenoptera, females hatch from fertilised eggs and males from unfertilised eggs. Worker wasps have lost the ability to mate, but can still lay male (unfertilised) eggs."

The wasp that we are familiar with is called the Yellowjacket (Vespula vulgaris) but there are an estimated 200,000 other species, most of which aren't interested in stinging humans.