Snap, shell, snow: June means pea season on the Vineyard.

It’s a rite of summer, seeing the “We Have Our Peas” sign placed for the first time in front of the Bayes Norton Farm stand on Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road. (The Vineyarder who originally painted the sign wrote “Pease,” thinking it was spelled the same as the old Island family.)

Their peas are so sweet it’s as though owners Jamie and Dianne Norton added sugar to the soil.

A valiant effort to save the life of two malnourished baby otters came to an end over the weekend.

One otter, found in a yard in Oak Bluffs on Thursday afternoon and sent Friday morning to the Trailside Museum in Milton, died over the weekend. A second baby otter, recovered on Friday not far from where the first otter had been found, also died.

The two otters, about eight weeks old, lost their mother when she was hit and killed on Barnes Road in Oak Bluffs on the morning of June 7.

Meet the beetles. The invasive exotic ones, that is. There is the goldenhaired bark beetle, the six-tooth bark beetle, the Mediterranean pine engraver beetle and the most dreaded of them all: the Asian long-horned beetle, which arrived on American shores a decade ago the way many foreign threats do, hiding in wood pallets.

At the Polly Hill Arboretum, collections and grounds manager Tom Clark and collections management intern Alyssa Janilla have been on guard for the unwelcome arrival of the voracious bugs by participating in a USDA monitoring program.