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| Doc waits for me at my toboggan loaded with dry balsam lengths for firewood |
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| Live balsam fir |
When you spend as much time as me cutting and hauling balsam fir by snowshoe and toboggan, you notice things. Like, why does about one tree in a thousand ooze blue sap? These are live trees, of course.
The best answer I can find on the Internet is not about balsam fir but other species and even then the experts are concerned with blue-coloured wood which is caused by a fungus.
I have cut down thousands of balsams over my life and I have never seen the blue wood inside. I think this is something different.
One possibility is something that occurs in Borneo.
There a latex-producing tree oozes blue sap that has been found to contain high amounts of nickel. Well, there is nickel around here too. About 15 miles from here there are serious nickel deposits that would be mined if the price for this metal was higher.
The balsams that ooze blue sap here on our property are along a rocky ridge.
Our property is at the base of Silver Mountain which was mined for silver back in the late 1800s.
If a reader has any insights, I would love to hear them.
3 comments:
Dan this may be a link to the cause. https://imafungus.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s43008-021-00076-w
Mike S.
Dan, I'm down here in Denver, CO. We've had a bark beetle invasion over the past 20+ yrs in our Rocky Mtns. This beetle is traveling from the south and killing our pines. Much of the wood is being used as finishing wood for exterior/interior homes. I'm not saying this is what is taking place in Ontario but surely take a peak. Colorado State University has been studying this beetle invasion. I believe I read sound is a way to push these beetles out of areas. I've also read the only way to kill these beetles is fire and multiple days/weeks of extreme cold.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.01731/full
Thanks, guys.
Well, the research papers you referenced do seem to explain what I'm seeing. Ophiostomatoid fungus or blue stain fungus can infect balsam fir -- Abies balsamea, along with just about every other conifer. And the fungus travels via beetles. That could easily be it.
As far as I can see, the Mountain Pine Beetle that devastated pine stands in the western U.S. and Canada, is not yet in Ontario. However, we have other native beetles that can be spreading the blue stain fungus.
Many of our balsam seem to be undergoing a slow death. It isn't sudden like what happens from spruce budworm. They have all their needles which just slowly become red or brown. The trees break easily in a big wind revealing carpenter ant cavities near the stump.
Balsam are a short-lived species. I think they are mature at 40 years. We have lived here in Nolalu for more than 30 years so some of these trees might just have reached the end of their lifespans.
I was splitting some dead balsam firewood pieces today and took a photo of some of the tiny bugs inside. I will post that above. These are probably 1/16 inch long. They look like flies. If I had to guess I would say they were fruit flies of some kind.
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