Aunt Linda here on a hot afternoon this last day of April, in the Old Pueblo. There is notable buzzing in the mesquite tree outside my door. It is a sound I wait for each spring.  For me, the best part of keeping bees is not the honey; though honey is remarkable. The best part is how they open wide my appreciation of the world around me.

If we were to hop a pollen grain and ride it back in time, all the way back to the Cretaceous Period, what would we find?  The first flowers on planet earth.  (Two hundred million years ago, there were plenty of plants on the planet, but no flowers.)

Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire, describes how “flowers changed everything” when they emerged on the planet.  “Instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand coevolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation.” (p108).

This coevolutionary compact has been so successful that we see it very much in action in our own yards and neighborhoods even as I write.Below are a few photos of this ancient dance thriving in my own backyard – showing Apis Mellifera (honey bees) moving plant pollen around in exchange for nutrition.

The female foraging bee is gather pollen (protein rich food). She rubs her fur on the anthers of flowers and then combs the pollen off her body with the special “pollen combs” located on her front and middle legs. (below)

She packs the pollen into her pollen sacks (alot like “saddle bags”) on her back legs and carries it back to the hive. (below)

Once back in the hive she will store the pollen into cells near the brood nest; She does this by lowering her back legs into the cell and knocking off the pollen pellet into the cell; if you look closely you will see many colors of pollen and sometimes more than one type of pollen pellet in one cell. (below)  Bee Bread is a mixture of of nectar and pollen stored to be later fed to baby bees.

Today’s Recipe is not a recipe at all, but an Invitation.

Seek out and taste fresh honeycomb.

Not just honey, but honey still in it’s wax comb.

If you do not have a beekeeper living near you, then look in a health food stores or farmers market.

It is pure joy to hold and smell and taste honeycomb –  and to taste honey so pure that the last “hands” that touched the honey, were the bees’s  before they capped the cell.   See if you can taste the mesquite, the rosemary, the cactus flower, or whatever blooms near you, within the honey.

Below is honeycomb I harvested this morning.

Cactus Flower and pollen being gathered; note the pollen sack on back leg (below)
More Cactus Flower pollinating going on (below)
Rosemary flowers and foraging bee (below)

Aunt Linda here:  The full moon is setting in the West early this morning,  and  I am lucky enough to be able to see the moon beaming from this desk. As if that weren’t enough beauty, the morning offers the sound of a male dove beginning his mating song. Soon more will join in.  As moon beams make their horizontal way into the yard, the silvery spider webs in the foliage around my door shimmer silvery white.

It is Spider Silk like in the above photo that females hummingbirds use to build secure, strong, and flexible nests.

SPIDER SILK:  Spiders use silk for a variety of reasons, web weaving, cocoon construction, and even in a kind of sperm delivery system.  All spiders have silk glands, which are located in their abdomen, and which emerge from tiny tubes in their spinnerets, known as spigots. Spiders, while not the only animals to produce silk, (caterpillars and weaver ants do), do produce the strongest silk, often compared to the strength of steel.  It also has a remarkable capacity to expand.  One example of this is referred to as “capture spiral silk” , and is used in web construction, allowing for prey to impact or collide with the web with minimal breakage.   Spider webbing is also relatively weatherproof, meaning that it has an ability to endure, sometime past the life span of it’s weaver.  This web longevity may be tied to its purported   antimicrobial/antiseptic properties.

I am going to share with you a few  photos of the young hummers growing; the nest accommodates all that Spring and young birds challenge it with. I am reverberating with the “Ah Hah” of how much of their success in fledging was due to the superior spider-silk building material that their mother used to build a strong, flexible nest.  They rode out significant winds, their little nest bobbing like a tiny boat in a stormy sea, because the nest was nest securely anchored to base of branches with spider web. The rapid growth of the two babies was easily accommodated as well as the spider web allowed it to expanded in size,  without breaking apart, as the babies grew. Much of the success of these little birds’  hatching, growing, and fledging  rested, literally,  on spider silk.

                                                                                                          The First and Second eggs were laid a day apart ….

                                                                                                             … they then hatched a day apart

                                                                                         Note: what a difference of just one day makes with their beak size!

When it came time for fledging, they flew off one day apart, as well. I was lucky enough to see this; they flew like “professionals” right off the rim of the nest!

I read this week that little Miss Muffet , (the girl scared away from her tuffet, by a spider, scattering curds and whey; too bad as they are so nutritious) had a father who revered spiders.  The Australian Museum website has a nice little piece on this should you want to find out more. It was from this source that I learned Reverend Dr. Thomas Mouffet (1553-1606) had a deep love of spiders. He wrote of the common house spider that “she doth beautifie with her tapestry and hangings.”. More interestingly, it appears that he liked to treat ailments with the use of spiders. The museum quotes him as writing, ‘The running of eyes is stopped with the dung and urine of a House Spider dropt with Oyl of Roses, or laid in along with Wooll’.

And back to modern day: scientists are exploring what spider silk may have to offer in terms of ligament healing in the human body.  Also interesting, the antimicrobial/antiseptic properties of spider silk that humans have long reported using to bandage and heal wounds, are being explored in scientific labs. This  moves the conversation forward, from anecdotal observation to preliminarily results of effectiveness in the lab as well.  I love a good opportunity to  come to terms with Life on Life’s terms.  The so often feared spider, who frightens so many Miss Muffets in the world, has so very much to offer. The spider contributes to new generations of pollinators, such as hummingbirds.  Yes, it is true that some spider bites do real harm. I know this first hand; a black widow bite is painful and in some can be dangerous. Yet it’s silk may have significant healing properties and scientific utility,  offering varied gifts to humans, as touched on above.

Which brings me to the concept of the Web of Life, which is an all encompassing view of  life where all of nature, including us humans, is seen as connected to all things, as if we were all connected by an enormous, invisible, yet dynamic web. Inspired by this idea, I thought we would revisit a recipe from the past and give it a new twist.

Web of Life Tea Eggs – Chinese Tea Eggs are often described as “marbled”. In the spirit of  todays theme, lets playfully re-interpret them as having a spider Web pattern. We featured this recipe in Feb 2014, but I like the recipe so much that I made a fresh batch and photographed all the steps, so that you will have real success! These Tea eggs are a Portable,  Aromatic, Healthy,  Flavorful and Beautiful savory snack. They can be eaten just as they are,  or can be used as a jumping off point for great deviled eggs or even a flavorful egg salad.

This being Holy Week/Easter you could try these in lieu of dying eggs with food coloring. Eggs are a powerful symbol of regeneration and new life.

Basic Recipe:

Ingredients:

*8-10 eggs

* 3 tablespoons of tea or three tea bags (black tea is most often used in Chinese tea * egg recipes, but any tea will do really – and it is fun to experiment. In the several years I have been making them I have used mostly loose leaf tea – this time I used some very old tea bags that I found in the back of a drawer). I did not give their flavor a second thought; but you could if you would like. Try it with green or oolong tea ….

* 3 tablespoons of Chinese Five Spice

The trick here is two baths.

1) In the first, you boil the eggs just like you do normally. Just the eggs and hot/boiling water. Boil until done.

2) In the second bath,  you mix up a bath of the tea and spices. This is the bath that you will simmer the eggs above, for the marbled/webbed flavor and color.

So:  When the eggs are hard boiled, you let them cool a bit for handling,  and then crack them, creating the beautiful web pattern. You can smash one side of an egg against the kitchen counter, and them play around with cracking them with your fingers and hands, for finer details. These cracks allow the flavor and color into the egg white. Simmer the eggs for as long as you would like – I simmered mine on low heat for over an hour.  Then I covered the pot and let them steep in the tea/spice bath for several hours. The peels are gorgeous as well.

I

                                         “There is another World, but it is in this one.”  W.B. Yeats

(The photo above is of a young hummer from a nest about three years ago, again here in the yard. At the end of this post is a “recipe” to invite hummer friendly nests into your world.)

Aunt Linda here on a very gusty March morning. Good thing that spiders provide their silky webs to the world, or the tiny nest right outside our door and it’s contents, might have been catapulted into oblivion.  The full moon is setting in the West, the direction I am facing as I write.  It’s white light is being thrown about as it passes through mesquite branches in a still beautifully dark sky

We can practically taste Spring on our tongues here in the Old Pueblo.  The ancient call of regeneration is in the air. Plants and Pollinators alike are in full swing. Native and non native bees are at the stone fruit trees, Birds are wooing one another with their lyrical mating songs.  It is easy to forget the function some birds play in pollination.

Pollination by birds has its own name: “ornithophily”.  Hummingbirds, Orioles, and nectar seeking birds are but a few types of birds that pollinate native plants, trees, and crops and that animals (including humans) eat.

What re-focused me on ornithophily – was the humming bird nest, (right outside the front door), that a female hummer built about 19-20 days ago. Watching her secure the nest was fascinating. For about 5 days, she brought gathered materials, using beak, chin, wings and her little bird rump to form and secure the nest inside and out.  When she was ready,  she laid her first egg. The second was the laid the very next day. Throughout this process, I watched her bring materials, such as spider webs, to the nest.  Intermittently, she would feast on the offerings of tubular flowers as well as upon tiny insects (that move in small, but visible, insect-clouds) high in the air;. Her graceful, skillful, movements  allowed her to move easily among the flowers and to pick insects out of mid air.

This whole episode opened my eyes and interest WIDE OPEN. I began researching the hatching time for baby hummers, which is approximately 15 to 16 days.  I stayed well away from the nest.  Until yesterday; which was day 16.  When she left to forage I carefully approached the nest, (skillfully built higher than many a predator can reach) and higher than my eye level.   Careful not to touch the nest (or any leaves around it)  I held my camera higher than the nest, and saw via photo that the first baby bird had hatched. (note: it is not the birds “sense of smell” that I am careful not to touch around the nest and leave a scent, but that of predators !)

Anatomy of a Nest:

I have been studying up on humming birds nests. The bottom and the wind side of the nest is often thicker than the downwind side. The thinner sides allow for breezes to pass though on warmer days, when cooling is needed. Interestingly, hummingbird nests built in the earlier and cooler springtime are thicker and deeper than those built in the warmer summer months. She camouflages the outside of the nest with materials from the immediate environment. Here in Tucson many hummingbird nests have tiny mesquite leaves and strips of bark from native trees. The insides are made soft with gathered materials – over the years I have seen (in this yard alone), nests made from cotton swiped from cotton plants that we had hung on the porch from the winter, wool from a mask made of sheep hair, stuffing gathered from outdoor furniture that had seen better days. You can clearly see in the photos in this post, the innovative use of spider webs in nest construction. She uses them to secure the base, as well as to build in the capacity for elasticity into the nest – so it remains in tact even as the babies grow.

The photo below is of the nest as it is being constructed – about day three or four.

Usually, a female hummingbird will build and fasten the nest onto the part of a tree or bush where branches overlap, crossing each other, or make a “Y”  for stability This is so the eggs or baby birds do not get catapulted off in one of springtime’s storms, or gusty winds like we have had here over the past few days. Note in the photo above, how the spider webs are woven into the nest, as well as how they fasten it to the base branches.   I have read that they will actually test and retest the site by repeatedly landing on it to see how it will hold. This skillful construction has helped the nest stay secure during the past few days of wind, where as this little egg (a robin egg perhaps?) did not fare so well. The broken egg photo was taken a three minute walk from the hummer nest. (note: a reader skilled in Birds wrote me to say she things the broken eggs are a Curved-bill Thrasher! Thank you!!!)

About 18 years ago, a docent at the Desert Museum shared a story that opened up the way I thought about the interconnectedness of things in nature. After meticulous research in to the types of humming birds,  plants and habitat requirements, the Desert Museum Built a beautiful state of the art Humming Bird sanctuary/exhibit. Once the Hummingbirds were introduced, all appeared to be well – they fed and flew contentedly, living the lives hummingbirds do. All appeared  fine in hummingbird paradise – except that no nest building was going on.

As you can imagine, this was taken very seriously and after thorough research, it was discovered that no spiders had been introduced into the ecosystem of the site.When spiders were introduced to the hummer system, and webs were spun and thus available, the hummers began building nests. For me, this is very profound. This deep interconnectedness of spider and baby hummer. It gives practical meaning to the idea of the web of life. It is also quite a gorgeous thing to behold – this gathering of spider webs by agile hummers. The first time I saw it, it was only because the shiny sliver strands were backlit by the sun. The female gathered them in her beak, with a kind of sweeping motion of her body.

Recipe – Tiny Egg Salad Nests (formally known as Deviled Eggs)

Like tiny hummer nests in and of themselves, hard boiled egg whites are well built and can hold precious cargo. Packed with protein eggs are a healthy and really tasty treat. Use herbs from your own garden or local surrounds to flavor your tiny-nest- snack.

Ingredients:

Use your favorite Deviled egg recipe, most people have their favorite one. In case you have not made them in a while, here is a basic recipe.

-6 eggs, hard boiled

-4 Tablespoons Mayonaise

-2 Tablespoon Mustard

-salt and paprika to taste.

-Herbs from the garden – here I used cilantro, parsley and pepitas (pumpkin seeds), even chiltepin.  If you use tea eggs, which we are going to revisit next month, you can enjoy the spider web like pattern/motif on the outside of your tiny nest !

-I often chop up the egg whites that break as I am preparing them; and add it to the “deviled egg” mixture – it makes it more like a True Egg Salad, within the tiny egg-white-nest.

– Make sure to “weave in” your version of silk silver spider strands of elasticity into whatever you are incubating.

Recipe to Make Your Own Yard/Surrounds Hummer Friendly :

*Provide nectar by planting their favorite plants (find out what is local to your region). Here in Tucson that includes wild and domestic tubular flowers such as Penstemon, which is a flower that grows wild here.  Hummers likely co-evolved with long, tubular flowering plants (think the length and shape of their beaks and tongues …)   and move deftly to such crimson red flowers in the herb garden, salvias , trumpet vine, penstemon, ocotillo blossoms, chuparosa tubes. They are also insect eaters, and pick the tiny, only to be seen if back lit, insects tight out of the air.

*Leave spider webs – and lichen (!) if you live in a region with lichen, for nest building.

* Avoid the use of harmful chemical sprays and poisons on your plants as the hummingbirds do rub up against blooms as they seek nectar and eat insects (for protein)

* make sure there is a water source for them

The photo above is the one I took yesterday afternoon, of the first hatchling.

I am happy to share that the nest rode out a very gusty night and morning just fine.

Let’s all send some appreciation to spiders for their webs, even when we might find them a little creepy – and to the skillful nest building of female hummingbirds.