The Urban Tree Book by Arthur Plotnik

Author:Arthur Plotnik [Plotnik Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71836-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2000-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

EVERYONE’S FAVORITE SWEET

With their abundant flowers and nectar, lindens have long been associated with creation. Pregnant women have hugged them (like elms and ashes) for good luck—though the practice has not quite swept urban America. Here the great linden huggers are bees, which gather the flowers’ nectar, and aphids, the tiny, soft-bodied bugs herded by ants for their honeydew.

The pebble-sized linden blossoms are “complete” flowers, having female and pollen-producing male parts. To be fertilized, all the flowers need are pollinators; and for about two weeks, when spring turns to summer, bees are deliriously happy to oblige. They work the trees in such profusion that some observers liken the buzz to an electric power station. Cultivated linden honey, sold as a delicacy and used in liqueurs, gives new meaning to the word “exquisite.”

Occasionally, bees are seen tumbling from a linden as if blotto, some not getting up. They are indeed intoxicated, in the sense of having ingested a toxic substance. The phenomenon occurs on certain linden varieties that have been bred for streets and gardens. The silver linden, with its hairy white underleaf, and Crimean linden, whose bright, shiny leaves resist aphids, are two such varieties. While the Crimean KO’s both honeybees and bumblebees, only the bumblebees fail to recover. Possibly, they eat toxic pollen while the honeybees stick to the nectar.

Aphids suck the sugary sap manufactured by the leaves as tree food. But an aphid also needs amino acids, which are scant in the sap. As a result, the bug sucks up a great deal more sugar than it can hold. The surplus, to tell it bluntly, shoots out the back door. Some of it lands on your car. Much of it feeds ants, certain flies and moths, and a sooty mold that blackens the leaf. The aphids themselves are dinner to a range of crawling and flying predators. Mites create horn-shaped houses for themselves on the leaf surface. Other visitors include Japanese beetles, caterpillars, lacebugs, and the basswood leaf roller, which makes itself a bedroll from part of the leaf and feeds off it until metamorphosis.

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