Colourful Fungi.

Riverside Walk.

Winter walks throw up surprises sometimes. Before the storms, two weeks ago I found these beautiful red mushrooms adorning rotten logs along the banks of the River Nairn. The’re gloriously red and jewel-like against green moss and bare bark and fairly brighten up an early February afternoon. I’d no idea what they were called till I posted a photo on Twitter and a couple of folk quickly came back with Scarlet Elf Cups. I was even more suprised to learn that they are edible since I’d assumed that the red colouring was a warning of toxins. Seemingly not, but I still think that I’ll admire them from a distance and not on my plate. You can check on the link below to read more about them.

http://www.gallowaywildfoods.com/scarlet-elf-cup-identification-edibility-distribution/

Looking for Wild Bees.

You can just see white butterbur, Petasites albus, in the top right of the top photo and the banks are just carpeted with them at this time of year. The river banks are wooded with bare alder and sycamore and a lot of light reaches the floor now so flowers flourish. It’s an ideal time to search for wild honey bees collecting pollen, so I searched the flower patches all the way along the path. It was perhaps a little late in the day for pollen collection so I’ll return to search again another time. White butterbur is a member of the daisy family and, like most of its relatives, is a really useful source of pollen and nectar for honey bees. The female butterbur flowers produce the nectar and the males yield pollen.

Back to Mushrooms.

For some years, Paul Stamets has been studying the positive effects of mycelium on immunity in relation to honey bees, and has come up with something interesting which you can read about below. In front of one of my hives is the remains of a tree stump that is covered in fungi at the end of summer and I’m always checking for honey bees on them. None seen so far.

Solutions Underfoot: How Paul Stamets is Using Mushrooms to Save the Bees