is the efficiency mechanical or animal?

i had the opportunity to have a look at a couple of industrial fields that were home to dense yellow #2 field corn last season...

and mostly what i found were cobs neatly stripped of kernels by the combine harvester...

along with a scattering of kernels in a number of places the combine obviously missed...

compared to fileds like this one that i have seen in the past today's were remarkably free of corn kernels...so it may be that combine harvesters have dramatically improved in efficiency or, this being january, wildlife may have been doing a remarkable job of gleaning the fields...one seems as likely as another, however given the severity of the cold in the last week or so, wildlife may have been doing as much efficient clean-up as any harvester...

along the berms of the fields i found an old acquaintance from the campus garden...carolina horse nettle...brought some fruits home to grow in containers as well as a few kernels of field corn to plant in the spring just to see what ( if anything ) happens...we will see...

and, lastly, plastic is everywhere...a local resident told me "people think our road is a garbage dump."

zea mays mexicana III

both plants are coming along well...

this one has three well developed leaves and the central leaf is topping out at just over seven inches...

while this one has sprouted a fourth leaf and the central one is pushing seven and a half inches...i am pleased if no one else is...beyond that it is a quiet january...no spuds chitting...no volunteers sprouting...and it is very cold and quiet in the back yard with sub-zero lows in the forecast for the next few days...nothing peculiar about that around here in january.

zea mays mexicana II

three days in and we have significant greening...

and the first true leaves on the teosinte...

so i dressed them with earthworm castings ( and, seemingly, a centipede )...gave them a shot of distilled water...

and lowered the light...the winter season has started...we will see how it goes...

zea mays mexicana

while i was rooting around in the plant room downstairs i came across some teosinte seeds from 2019...so i took five of them and soaked them in hydrogen peroxode for twenty minutes to break dormancy ( or attempt to...no idea if five year old, unfrozen seed, would be viable ) and put them in a dark place in a baggie wrapped in damp brown paper towel for a couple of weeks...

and a reasonable forty percet actually did germinate...

so i planted them in a container of garden soil and gave them a healthy watering...

and lowered the light...if they develop well i wil be planteing some of this seed outdoors in spring rather than thaw out a batch...stay tuned for develpments if you're interested

zea mays parviglumis and popcorn

i have the teosinte variety zea mays parviglumis growing in a number of places around the yard that i planted in late may...it has a long growing season...155 days if i am not mistaken, it has been a while since i found that information and, despite varied queries, the interweb is not cooperating in puking the information out today...i do not have that much time for the plants to mature so seeing silks and ears, much less seed, is unlikely...i simply grow it for the morphological comparison with its descendant maize...despite the low probability of a complete season ( one cannot tell exactly what the climate and/or weather will do )...

several of the plants have begun to flower so we may see mature male blooms if nothing else...i will take what i can get here...

that, simply for comparative purposes, is a popcorn plant and an "improved" genetic relative of teosinte...no tillers here at all, unlike its ancestor...

grown from a seed found, almost incredibly, germinating in a straining screen in a shower drain...odd things can happen here.

just a morphological note

that is a kernel of maize without a husk that has formed just below a stunted flower on a tiller...

which would seem to be a habit it picked up from its ancestor teosinte which was doing the same thing last season.

arrival

fed-x delivered the bee cocoons on the twelfth and, as usual, i put the tube n the refrigerator for fifteen minutes to calm down any bees that hatched out ( always the boys ) in transit and then took it outside...

i was mildly surprised to find no active, if somewhat dopey, bees when i opened the tube...

and even moreso when i began to pour out the cocooons...

i placed the cocoons in the hatchery...

secured the anti-critter netting...

and zip-tied down the roof...

as i got to the end of the tube three of the boys that had hatched out in transit did appear, however by that time they had warmed enough to be fully operational and off they flew before i actually got any good photos...

they seemed pleased to be out of the tube and out in the world, going off to explore...

last year one of the hatched boys was missing a wing...he hung around the hatchery for a while and then vanished...i'd like to think to safety however there are a lot of predators in the yard...the good news this year is everyone took off with an even chance...always good to find a plus...i will keep an eye out for hatching girls...they keep to their own schedule so keeping an eye out may not equate to seeing.