bee bars open on top of old Smoky

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This time of the year, Indian Gap on the Smokies crest can be a very busy place, a regular honky-tonk district. Very close to where I once found a cloaked knotty-horn and often hear saw-whet owls in late May, the bee bars (or in this case wasp-bars) are opening for business.

Filmy angelica is a robust wildflower that grows at the high elevations of the national park in early August. Although angelicas are in the culinary herb parsley family, by contrast, they are dangerously poisonous. Despite the angelic name, they do not belong anywhere near your kitchen. 

Bees and wasps apparently become intoxicated after feeding on the toxic flowers. It is reported in “Wildflowers of the Smokies” that they have been observed behaving crazily after a visit to angelica.

The only odd insect behavior I usually see is lethargy but I don't get too close. I'm OK with bees, my Dad was a beekeeper, but wasps I avoid because could there be anything more agitating or agitated than a drunken yellow-jacket?

Could this be the origin of the term “getting a buzz on”?

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lucky shot

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Sometimes, you just get lucky.

I was photographing wildflowers at Indian Gap on the Smokies crest when I noticed a brightly colored beetle land on a flower very near me.

I stepped closer, began to frame the image and almost at the same instant that I squeezed the shutter, the beetle opened its elytra and unfurled its wings. Click! And the magnificent bug had flown. Had I gotten the shot? One nanosecond later, I would have not.

I had never seen the beetle before, but I soon found the cloaked knotty-horn, a.k.a. elder borer in an Audubon field guide. It’s a long-horned beetle noted for its bright orange cloak, metallic-blue back and the enlarged knot-like knees at the antennal segments. (For some reason, my knotty-horn only has one antenna.)

The knotty-horn lays its eggs in the ground near the base of an elderberry shrub. (And there were plenty of elderberries growing near where we were.) The larvae burrow into the stems of the plant (hence the second common name: elder borer). The small grubs then move down into the roots and pupate in the soil. The adults appear from June through September to start the process anew.

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drunk bee!

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I return once again to the bee bars at Indian Gap. Happy Hour begins at dusk and like Hotel California, you might check in but you may never leave.

The bee in the center of this Smoky Mountain wildflower: filmy angelica (Angelica triquinata) is drunk. Shamelessly. Or at least, I think it was. I didn't ask it to fly in a straight line but I did stroke it a couple of times and it didn't want to move. It wiggled, perhaps even cooed. (Do bees coo?) Sober bees do not let you stroke them, although they may have a temper, bees are by nature temperate.  


So, this bee was alive, just out of it. Inebriated. Loaded. Plastered. Smashed. Something more than just a buzz. It wasn't a sloppy drunk or a mean drunk, but rather, more of a sleepy, Auntie Edna kind of drunk.

Pam Petko-Seus, the wildlife biologist at Ijams Nature Center, did black bear research on the top of the Smoky Mountains in the early 1980s. She told me they often saw drunk bees on angelica that "didn't seem to know their way home. They just spent the night clinging to the flowers, and in the morning they were covered with dew."

That's intoxicated!

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on top of old Smoky

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Sometimes, just knowing they are there is enough.

Yes. I know Northern saw-whet owls live and nest on the top of Old Smoky, but they are secretive and I’ve never been up there at the right season, or right time of the day or in the right conditions to hear one. So for that matter, they might as well nest on the moon.

Dr. Fred Alsop knows the issues. He writes in his Birds of the Smokies, “The peak of singing activity is from the first week of April through the third week of May.”

“Weather conditions seem to be a major factor influencing singing, with most vocalizations coming on clear nights with little or no wind. Rain, fog, low clouds, and other inclement conditions make the chances of hearing this owl almost zero.”

If you know the higher elevations of the Smokies, you know that inclement conditions are a daily occurrence, things change hourly, clouds move in, clouds move out. Perfect conditions are never a guarantee. 

Alsop continues, “I have found from one to eleven birds singing in a single night between Newfound Gap and Clingmans Dome, although there have been many nights when I heard none, even though all the conditions seemed right.”

So, it’s a long way to drive with no guarantee of hearing a single saw-whet.

Still, here we were in Gatlinburg the last weekend in May with nothing on our day-planner. Should we roll the dice? Was a saw-whet in our future, waiting?

After watching the sunset from an overlook, we moved on to Indian Gap on the Clingmans Dome Road and waited in the grass, as the evening grew dark. Conditions seemed right.

Then it came from down the trail to the left of Mt. Collins: “whot-whot-whot-whot-whot.” Mechanical. Eerie. Monotonous. Otherworldly. Unmistakable. And the darker the night ebbed, the closer the little hooter moved up the mountain and our impromptu bivouac.

Yes. Sometimes, just knowing it’s there is enough, but sometimes it's not. 

On this night we got lucky. Sometimes you do.

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new bee bar

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You can add this photo to our collection of flowers just beginning to unfurl. I love the birthing of it, the natalness. It's like looking at a newborn baby through the maternity ward window in the hospital, new to the world, filled with promise.

But the promise of this wildflower is stupefying.

At Indian Gap, on the Top of Old Smoky, we returned to the drunken bee angelicas and found this one just beginning to open for business. Think of it like TV's "Cheers," the neighborhood tavern where everyone knows your name.

By the time you read this, the bees will already have their buzz on.

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sustenance

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Our trip to Indian Gap proved fruitful.

I've posted for a week about what we found at one well-traveled mountain crossing in the Great Smokies. There were the cloaked knotty-horn, the Turk's cap, the drunken bees and even the parasitic, strangling dodder. That was all well and good, quite interesting. Fun to think about.

But although those natural curios may thrill, they can't sustain. Luckily, blueberries were also beginning to ripen. I’m not sure what species, there are several native to the mountains, but at 5,270 feet above sea level, it’s a safe bet that it was one of the highbush varieties found the park.

Did I say "yum!"

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