Photo by Rick Gush

I found a swarm of my neighbor’s bees in my backyard.

The excitement in our neighborhood this week was a big swarm of bees. I was walking back from the garden and noticed a lot of bees in the air. I looked around and saw a small mass of bees gathering on a little olive tree in my neighbor’s yard. I rushed up to the office to grab my camera and went back down to take some photos. Although I’ve never kept bees myself, I’m pretty sure bees aren’t particularly dangerous even when they’re massing, so I got pretty close with the camera.

Lots of people keep bees here in Rapallo, Italy. One sees most of the brightly painted hives along the edges of the city, but a few people with the larger gardens in the city center also have bee hives. Several of the small farmers who sell produce at the daily vegetable market also sell honey, beeswax candles and propolis. I often buy propolis myself to use as a general protectant and a wound sanitizer.

Although we do see a lot of Honey bees in our garden, I think the larger portion of the bees we see are solitary bees. In addition to Mason bees, there are a half dozen species of big solitary bees that come around when the tomatoes and squashes are flowering. Some of those are particularly good looking bees. I think the fact that all the populated zones in Liguria are surrounded by brush and woodlands helps keep the number of wild bees quite high. 

Photo by Rick Gush

My neighbor patiently scooped up the bees and returned them home.

The Honey bee situation here in Italy is, like the States, troubled by the Varroa mites, and beekeepers report a serious decline in hive population numbers. But there are so many people who do keep bees that even with the decline, there are a whole lot of Honey bees still flying around.

I get a kick out of the fact that the two of the most common vehicles here in Italy are called Vespas and Api, or Wasps and Bees. Vespas are scooters and Api are the common little three-wheeled vehicles, which actually are just a tiny truck body mounted on a scooter.  It cracks me up to see that inside the cab, instead of a steering wheel, there is a set of scooter handlebars.

So, while I was photographing the bee swarm, one of the neighbors who keeps bees came along with his gear to collect the bees, which were, in fact, his. He says the crazy wet and cold spring disturbs the bees, and they more frequently leave their hives to travel around.

Once he put on his hood and gloves, he gently scooped the center of the swarm (and the quee) into the transportation box and waited patiently while the swarm re-formed in the box. Then he carried the bees back home. The nonchalance of the whole situation was charming, as if he was just retrieving a lost goat. I walked by the spot about a half hour later, and where there had been thousands of bees previously, there wasn’t a bee in sight.

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Courtesy Purdue Extension/ Bethany Ratts

In 2009, late blight affected tomato and potato crop across the Northeast and Midwest, but the threat of the disease returning in 2010 is unlikely.

After late blight was such a burden in 2009, tomato growers in the Northeast and Midwest wonder if the potentially fatal disease will hit crops again this year. Experts at Purdue University say a repeat of last year’s outbreak is unlikely. 

Although late blight, which thrives in cool, damp conditions, should not return as aggressively as it did in 2009, tomato growers still should be aware of symptoms, says Daniel Egel, a plant pathologist at the Purdue cooperative extension.

“Late blight causes large brown lesions on tomato leaves and stems that under moist conditions are often ringed with the white fungus,” Egel says. “Symptoms caused by late blight may look like other common tomato diseases and, thus, may be easily missed if not sent for accurate diagnosis.”

Late blight, which is caused by a fungus called Phytophthora infestans, is spread by spores carried by wind, rain, or through seeds or transplants. It does not live in soil or dead plants. The late blight outbreak in 2009 is believed to have been caused by infected tomato transplants sold to homeowners at retail stores and spread to other plants before it could be stopped.

“These plants were grown in the South, where late blight is more likely to overwinter, and shipped north,” Egel says. “From homeowners, the disease jumped to commercial growers as well.”

Tomato growers, including those who grow in containers, who suspect the disease is affecting their plants can contact a county educator and send a sample to a plant and pest diagnostic laboratory. Call your local cooperative extension to see if it offers this service.

Send the infected part of the plant to be tested, says Egel. Late blight symptoms can show up on the leaves, stems or fruit.

“Roots of tomato plants won’t show symptoms, but potato tubers might,” he says.

In the case of confirmed late blight, pesticides containing the fungicide chlorothalonil can be used to help stop the spread of the disease to uninfected plants. Organic growers may find that copper products will slow the spread of late blight.

If you notice your tomatoes showing symptoms of late blight, take these steps to extinguish the late blight fungus, and keep you and your 2010 crop safe:

1. Do not eat the fruit. Plants infected with late blight can cause illness.
2. Do not compost plants infected with late blight.
3. Destroy this year’s volunteer tomatoes if your crop was affected by late blight in 2009.
4. Do not use 2009 potato seeds when planting the 2010 crop.
5. Avoid tomatoes or potatoes that overwintered in greenhouses. These plants potentially could have harbored the late blight fungus.
6. Inspect tomato transplants before buying. Avoid buying those that show symptoms of disease.

For a hen at the bottom of the pecking order, Baby Jo really doesn’t have it that bad. The other hens let her sleep in the coop, and when she recently decided to try to hatch a clutch of eggs in the corner, none of them hassled her.

But her status in the group is painfully obvious when the eating is good. The other hens chase her away from the best clumps of scratch, the biggest pieces of chopped fruit and the juiciest bugs in the horse stalls. She’s the only hen not allowed to eat with the group. It’s sad to see.

But Baby Jo has an outlet. It can’t be easy being the omega, and frustrations no doubt build up. That’s where the English sparrows come in.

English sparrows are the omegas of the wild-bird crowd, at least when it comes to biologists. A non-native species that has driven many less adaptive songbirds to near extinction, U.S. naturalists see the English sparrow as a blight. Those passionate about maintaining bird feeders aren’t too thrilled with these LBBs (little brown birds) either. They come in large flocks, decimate all the seed in a feeder in a matter of minutes, and then fly off, leaving nothing but their poop behind.

Of course Baby Jo has no way of knowing the American ornithologist’s view of English sparrows. Yet, she has somehow picked up on the fact that these birds are below even her on the totem pole. 

Baby Jo regularly makes her stand on our small backyard lawn, where we toss the scratch. This is where she forages for whatever is left after the rest of the flock have moved on to other endeavors. Although she may be the youngest and newest member of the flock, she becomes someone else altogether whenever an unsuspecting English sparrow lands there to scavenge. 

The transformation is amazing. Baby Jo goes from mild mannered barnyard fowl to something out of Jurassic Park. She lowers her neck, juts out her head and runs at the bird like a velociraptor. The poor sparrow takes off with a surprised chirp, no doubt stunned that a giant gray monster is lunging madly in his direction.

I happen to like English sparrows and think they are charming little birds despite their bad public image. So I was tempted to intercede in this drama by putting some feeders up near the lawn. I’d fill them with chicken scratch and let the sparrows eat out of reach of the demon Baby Jo.

But then I realized that Baby Jo probably needs to have someone she can boss around. Chasing sparrows no doubt makes her feel a bit more powerful in the world when she really has no power at all. So I keep throwing scratch on the lawn, always spreading a little bit more every day than I know the chickens will eat.

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Photo by Rick Gush

We began harvesting our fava beans, or “fave” as they are known in Italy, in May.

Sometimes, I get reader mail from people who are interested in growing fava beans. I always tell them that gardeners just about anywhere except in the tropical climates can grow them. I’m sorry, but you growers in Florida and Hawaii can grow some big plants, but they probably won’t set many pods. Of course, everything comes down to microclimate, so maybe the gardeners who live up on the mountains in Hawaii might be able to grow fava beans with success.

The key to growing fava beans is to have a nice, cool season when the heat-hating flowers can be pollinated and set fruit. In places with really cold winters, fava beans can be planted in the spring and will manage to set the fruit before the summer heat sets in. In places that have winters with perhaps a bit of snow but a lot of days between 50 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit, fava beans are best planted in the fall.

Here in Northern Italy, it’s traditional to plant these beans, called fave, on the second day of November. I’ll confess that I didn’t do so this year; I planted the “early” variety six weeks ago and planted the regular fave a week ahead of schedule. In both cases, I’ll have to wait until early spring to harvest the beans.

The good news for American gardeners is that the availability of good fava-bean seeds in the United States has never been better. Early, late, long pod, short pod, dwarf and a number of named fava bean varieties are available.

When I plant fava beans, I try to mix some fireplace sweepings into the soil, because the extra potassium helps combat the almost inevitable rust fungi that will attack the plants next spring. I also like to create some sort of staking system, because the big mature plants loaded with huge seed pods can become quite floppy, and I’d rather the pods didn’t touch the muddy ground.

Some serious farmers plant fava beans as a cover crop for their nitrifying action. The crop is also often used in rotational schemes because it can be planted after anything; it won’t get whatever diseases or pests might have been bothering a previous crop on the same plot of soil. Fava beans don’t make a particularly large harvest of edible produce, and even those are more often fed to animals than destined for human consumption. But fava beans do generate a fairly high amount of soil nitrogen, and they create a whole lot of compostable organic material.

Although fava beans can be dried and eaten later in soups, many gardeners, including myself, are crazy for fresh fava beans. I’m a goat, and like to eat the beans right out of the pod, but my more civilized wife takes the time to remove the light-green shell protecting the beans before eating them.

In any case, we eat them in many ways, but the traditional May Day afternoon snack of fresh fava beans, salty Pecorino cheese and local salami is divine.

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