Are these honeys too?

[DShroomGuy]

Went to a completely different spot on the other side of town. On my lunch break I run down to a boat landing road and do a quick hunt in an area with oak, river birch, cypress, and Hickoreries. Only get like 10 min to look by the time I get there but can't help the opportunity to look. As soon as I hit the woods line I immediately saw these coming up through the leaf litter. There's so many trees though I'm sure there is wood or dead roots probably everywhere. Maybe they were growing from stuff under the leaves and soil. Was in a hurry and overlooked digging in there a bit to see. Anyways they bare resemblance to the honeys I found a few days ago though maybe not 100% exact. There appears to be white spores on the caps of a few too already. There was a bigger one overtop these in the pic with spores on them. There is a partial veil, gills attached to stalk, spores white, and otherwise very similar to the other ones I had. Think I got a winner again!?! Maybe a different species but the end of the stem is a bit bulbous too like the others. Maybe again A. gallica?

 

[Dave W]

Armillaria. I think the sam species as the ones in the citrus grove, A. gallica. The stringy partial veil that partly collapses onto the stalk as a white ring zone (as opposed to forming a well-defined ring) points this way.  

[DShroomGuy]

Thanks Dave! If I understand correctly I should be able to go back to the same spots every year at the right time and possibly find some there? Gonna have to go back to the citrus spot tomorrow. There was immature ones coming. It's misty light rain all day today here. Might have spurred more action to occur and those others should be grown out. They certainly weren't bad at all. Definitely was good eats. Though my palate isn't hard to please. I'll eat damn near anything so long as it isn't full of man-made junk or GMOs etc. Full blown health nutter here.

[troutddicted]

Yup, they will come back year after year.  Timing may be variable, cool temperatures and rain is the typical jump starter here in my area.

[Dave W]

Armillaria plays at least two roles in Nature, parasite and saprobe. When in the saprobic stage the fungus is feeding off dead/decaying wood/roots. I think this is the stage when most of the mushrooms are produced. Once the nutrients are used up the mushrooms may fail to appear again in that same spot. But, the Armillaria fungus seems to readily spread to new trees, or maybe there's another tree that begins to die, and the mushrooms are then found close to where they had previously been. So, some areas get Armillaria mushrooms for many years running. On the hand, I have seen Armillaria apparently dry up in some spots, usually areas that were logged, leaving behind a lot of stumps/roots that produced mushrooms until the stumps/roots no longer contained enough nutrients. 

As has already been said, weather also plays a role. If the weather is too dry during the time if year when Armillaria is apt to produce mushrooms, then there may be very few or even no mushrooms at all during such a given year. This can basically be said about any type of wild mushroom, saprobic or mycorrhizal.