Summer honey fungus (Kuehneromyces mutabilis)
Systematics:
- Department: Basidiomycota (Basidiomycetes)
- Subdivision: Agaricomycotina (Agaricomycetes)
- Class: Agaricomycetes (Agaricomycetes)
- Subclass: Agaricomycetidae (Agaricomycetes)
- Order: Agaricales (Agaric or Lamellar)
- Family: Strophariaceae (Strophariaceae)
- Genus: Kuehneromyces (Kyuneromyces)
- Species: Kuehneromyces mutabilis (Summer honey agaric)
or
Kyuneromyces changeable
Summer honey fungus (lat.Kuehneromyces mutabilis) is an edible mushroom of the Stropharia family.
Summer honey agaric hat: Diameter from 2 to 8 cm, yellow-brown, strongly hygrophane, lighter in the center (in dry weather, the zoning of color is not so pronounced, sometimes absent altogether), first convex with a tubercle in the center, then flat-convex , sticky in wet weather. The pulp is thin, light brown, with a pleasant smell and taste. It often happens that the caps of the 'lower tier' mushrooms are covered with a brown layer of spore powder from the upper mushrooms, and it seems as if they are rotten.
Plates: First light yellow, then rusty-brown, adherent to the peduncle, sometimes slightly descending.
Spore powder: Dark brown.
Summer mushroom leg: Length 3-8 cm, thickness up to 0.5 cm, hollow, cylindrical, curved, hard, brown, with a brown filmy ring, dark brown below the ring.
Distribution: Summer honey agaric grows from June to October (bears fruit abundantly, as a rule, in July-August, not later) on decaying wood, on stumps and deadwood of deciduous trees, mainly birch. Under suitable conditions, it comes across in huge quantities. It is rarely found on conifers.
Similar species: According to foreign experts, one should first of all remember about the fringed gallery (Galerina marginata), which grows on the stumps of coniferous trees and is poisonous, like a pale grebe. Due to the strong variability of the summer mushroom (it was not for nothing that it was called 'mutabilis'), there are practically no universal signs by which it should be distinguished from a bordered gallery, although it is not so easy to confuse them. In order to avoid accidents, you should not collect summer mushrooms in coniferous forests, on coniferous tree stumps.
In dry weather, Kuehneromyces mutabilis loses many of its characteristics, and then it can be confused with literally all mushrooms that grow in similar conditions. For example, with winter honeydew (Flammulina velutipes), sulfur-yellow pseudo-heaps (Hypholoma fasciculare) and brick-red (Hypholoma sublateritium), as well as with seroplastic pseudo-foams (Hypholoma capnoides). Moral: do not collect stale summer mushrooms, which already do not look like themselves.
Edible: Considered a very good edible mushroom, especially in Western literature. In my opinion, it is really very good in a boiled, 'slightly salted' form. In other species it is lost.
Remarks Mosquitoes often ambush the summer mushroom thickets. It's true. And also summer honey mushroom is the most delicious, healthy and 'collectable' mushroom of the beginning of summer. If only not for these mosquitoes.
Photo of the mushroom Summer mushroom from the questions in recognition:
2017.10.16 
2019.06.12 Natalia 
2018.10.15 Vitalij 
2018.04.08 
2017.08.12 Marina 
2017.02.26
