Honeydew

In the quiet calm of the early morning last week I noticed a humming sound from above, similar to the noise you hear when bees are working trees in flower. The messmates and peppermints on our place are not flowering, the messmates finishing by the end of February, and the peppermints, which flowered last November, don't attract bees anyway. Wasps, I thought. Perhaps feeding on the leaf insects, as I'd concluded they were doing at other times when I'd watched them working at the white lerps on the eucy leaves. But the noise was loud, surely there aren't that many wasps around.
(On the subject of wasps, I have to correct to a prediction I made last winter. I noted that there were no queen wasps in our winter firewood. There's usually three or four of them in every barrow load and I concluded that the sudden cold snap last April hard on the heels of a prolonged March heatwave stopped the issue of queen wasps in the autumn to start next seasons nests. I predicted few European wasps this season. I was wrong. The dry winter and warm stable spring weather, with abundant nectar flows resulting in the wonderful honey crop, must have been good for overwintering wasp nests. There are many now. Maybe the queens left in the early spring and have now built up big nests with the suitable conditions. I've destroyed seven recently but as soon as I started extracting honey last Saturday they were finding a way into the shed.)
The next morning, Saturday, as I sat on the steps that join the split levels of our house to put my socks on, I could hear the humming outside through the fly wire door, the glass slider having been left open as it was a warm night. Surprised by this, I stopped my walk more than once under trees in the street, looking up into the foliage. Against the backdrop of the whitish early morning sky, large numbers, thousands, of flying insects were easily seen moving busily to and from and around the leaves of the messmates and peppermints. This was heavy bee activity and the hum/buzz was loud. As I watched, bellbirds were also busy working in the foliage. I counted 16 in one tree.
When I returned fom my walk, nearly an hour later, the insect activity had reduced and was minimal. The bellbirds were still busy. The bellbirds live only in an area around and fairly close to our house. A couple of hundred metres up Quinn Rd., there are no bellbirds and few messmates and peppermints. Nor was there humming of the bees and wasps. That's the great thing about walking ritually. You observe. You listen. You focus on the moment. One foot follows the other in faith, while the mind and the heart opens to the present and the senses. Like a hunter gatherer absorbed in the moment, there's a connecting feeling to all you see; the lie of the land, people, trees, birds, insects, horses, dogs, even the town. Only the walk and what you see and think matters. All else is suspended.
I'm believing that for the first hour of daylight my bees are working the secretions of insects, exuded during the night and not yet evaporated or dissipated by the heat of the day or the wind.

This morning I researched. I quote my old textbook, 'The Hive and The Honey Bee', a Nth American book.
"HONEYDEW- This is a sweet liquid excreted by homopterous insects, principally plant lice(aphids) and scale insects, feeding on plants. It is frequently gathered and stored by bees and is generally considered inferior to honey in flavour and quality. It may often be found on leaves of such trees as oak, beech, poplar, ash, elm, hickory, maple, tulip, willow, linden, and fruit trees as well as fir, cedar, and spruce. The amount of honeydew collected will depend on the availability of nectar, which is generally preferred by the bees."

It would seem that as the day warms and flowers show nectar the bees move on. Now, why is the humming in the trees only in the vicinity of our house and the bellbird population? Again I did some research, this time with the help of Google.

"CULL TAKES TOLL OF BELLBIRDS, TO SAVE THE FOREST.
December 4, 2006
For Rob High the tinkling of bellbirds is the noise of the forest being killed. The far South Coast resort operator is midway through the state's first large scale bellbird culling program, having gained approval to remove between 2000 and 3000 of the small birds which have invaded his 300 hectare property near Merimbula.
Bellbirds have been implicated in the death of swathes of forest between Victoria and Queensland. Some estimates put the area under threat at up to 2.5 million hectares of native forest in NSW alone.
No one knows exactly why such large areas of forest are dying or how the birds may be involved - it is primarily a case of guilt by association.
But it seems clear the bellbirds displace other species and then disturb the delicate balance of the insects that live on eucalypts, said consultant ecologist, Dr. Jim Shields.
The birds are caught in mist nets and then killed, with the approval of the RSPCA, using carbon dioxide gas. Mr High said based on wages and cost of equipment, each bird has cost him about $10 to catch.
It is also difficult to pinpoint why bellbird and insect numbers increase in the first place, said Paul Meek, an ecologist with the Government's inter-agency bell miner associated dieback working group. About the only certainty is that the presence of excessive numbers of bellbirds is an indicator that something is wrong with the ecosystem."

Other sources suggest bellbirds 'farm' insects. Their aggressive territorial nature drives away other insect eating birds, causing a population explosion of the insects. Eventually trees die, which is what's happening on our block and nearby. We lose a few every year, peppermints seem most susceptible. It provides firewood, and the bees get a dawn feed of honeydew. I miss the other small birds though. Apparently pardalotes, in particuliar, are great for controlling tree insects, but are displaced by bellbirds. Maybe the European wasp, being carniverous, is of some use after all, helping, even slightly, to reduce numbers of tree insects.