Rain ends and wildflower picts ...

Today in Genetics, we studied Indian corn ears produced with a kernal color gene (purple was dominate over yellow) and starchy (rounded kernel) was dominate over sugary (wrinkled) kernels.  We tallied the number of kernels exhibiting each of these phenotypic traits and assigned the Mendelian ratio for each.  Students then gave one parental cross that would have yielded each ear.  Tomorrow is Logal Genetics software on our old Mac laptops  ... continuing our study of modes of inheritance and our Chapter 4 discussion questions.

In Selected Topics we continued our study of weather (7 Days of Weather!) and began our study of the rock cycle, crinoid fossils, rock layers in Allen County and geologic time.

Our computer programming class worked on our Guessing Game problem in Microsoft qBASIC.

The rain ended today as Tropical Storm Lee moved to the northeast.  We ended up getting about 4 inches of rain over three days.  It was a great rain with no run off.  This evening I took a walk down to Long Creek.  Lots of wildflowers have already recovered from our dry August.  There are several acres of wingstem and ironweed for our bees to work.  I have one hive down by Long Creek in the bottom and there were bees coming into it this evening at a rate of about 100 per minute.  They are already back to work after the rain.  In the small valley behind our house were two wildflowers that I did not recognize and had to look up.
The first was a couple of Great Blue Lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) ... a beautiful blue flowering plant, a perennial.

Nearby are several Virginia Bugleweed (Lycopus virginicus) plants that are in the mint family and perennials.  I like the small white flowers at the base of the leaves.