Honeybees, Chainsaws, et alia

The subjects of both of these pictures are higher in the air than they appear. Nycholas Hansen is pruning, his feet at least 10' in the air and the giant bees nest is 7 or 8 times that high. We couldn't figure out any reasonable way to get the honey down! It is difficult to grasp the scale of the honeybees' nest from this picture, but no one would stand beside it. Just joking. It appeared to be a bit over 3' high and half that wide. There must be a lot of honey.

This Monday's project was in The Gotelli Collection. My part involved chainsawing dead trees and limbs and hauling them away. The other part involved pruning in various places high and low.

I haven't been in Gotelli since the last project, tsk tsk, and since we were working near the small pond with the wonderful Taxodium knees, I took a look at the colony of Leitneria. Corkwood is, someone said, the second lightest (least dense) wood in the world. I am guessing balsa wood might be lighter. It is a plant of southern wetlands and more a curiosity than a beauty, but its okay looking and its "lightness" is very cool. We (Fern Valley) just received plants ex Ron Lance (superb SE botanist) via Kevin Conrad, the curator of the Woody Landscape Plant Germplasm Repository at the South Farm Campus in Beltsville.