Tag Archive | insect closeups

Saturday, June 15

Prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata, or Stanley’s Piñata Rosie called it) waves brilliant yellow behind purple and pink salvia, firecracker penstemon, blue flax, gallardia, silver sage, and milkweed.

Prince’s plume provides a wealth of lovely insects sipping at its flagrant flowers.

A Saturday. A morning rounds day. The dogs agitate restlessly, subtly, for a W-A-L-K. But I can’t go yet. I must spend this morning among the wildly blooming flowers of such variety, and the infinite shades of green in the lush growing leaves. Winecups, Callirhoe, with pink salvia; palmer penstemon at its best. Time to pick up all the buckets, pails, bales, bags and hoses strewn about, and make this garden the showplace that it is.

Cloud cover rolls in as I’m photographing flowers with bugs and bees, sun in, sun out, the wind stirs and calms. Camera is best set aside. I have another day of roses, of pink penstemons; yellow and orange columbines, creamy panicles on the golden elder, aromatic lilac twigs of Larry’s eyebrow, purple penstemons will last at least a few more days. Gallardia, salvias pink and purple will last a long time. The roses will be gone overnight when they go, replaced by swelling green hips then ripe red ones. A bumblebee lands on a wild rose blossom… I cannot resist despite the fickle light, and move to the rosebush camera in hand.

These two tiny bugs danced around the same rose for awhile before meeting face to face and greeting one another.

It looks like this insect is eating an ant. I can’t be sure.

Rose bee.

Though I couldn’t catch the bumblebee on the rose, this wasp cooperated.

All kinds of bugs disappear into the corollas of penstemon strictus, then either turn around to leave…

… or back out.

As the honeysuckles wind down they continue to attract wild bees.

Still and overcast, excellent for the firefighters throughout the state, and the west. Last night smoke from a new fire on the western slope, just north of I-70, layered the northwest sky purple and pink as the sun set. Today, after a calm morning with clouds intermittently obscuring the sun, the winds have picked up and thick grey clouds are trying to spit rain. One brutal long gust and one rolling thunder lay all my peace of mind to rest.

Who’s on What?

Jun4

Pollen Pants 13 enjoys a delicate blossom on blueleaf honeysuckle, Lonicera korolkowii

This time of year, the rare moments I get to breathe in the beauty of all that’s come in the garden, all that’s been done, all that’s in order, growing, blooming, thriving, are few and far between, crowded out by sights of what still needs doing. But I am at the threshold today of passing on to the sweetest part of the carnival ride through summer; the ratcheting crash of the roller coaster into full-on weed season has slowed to a slog uphill to equilibrium, and now what’s undone diminishes incrementally, while what’s done bursts into a profusion of blooms.

The bees have drawn me back into the garden, and the garden has drawn me back into connection with the bees. We are finding again right relationship. Bees weave me like a documenting thread through all that happens in this garden now: Each day I am eager to step outside with the camera, asking “Who’s on what today?”

I watched in fascination this morning as this wasp gnawed at the bases of the penstemon blooms, here apparently squirting nectar from the wound. Below, mandibles and tongue at work; and bottom, a honeybee takes advantage of the wounds, following peaceably behind the wasp and inserting her tongue into the gnawed corolla bases.

My happiest days are those when I get up, go outside, and start doing what I’m told. Who tells me? The garden? God? My intuition? Who is it that speaks to me through my own voice? The practice of Morning Rounds brings me deepening peace.

Mid-May at Mirador

May21

Bees drinking at the pond congregate in one specific shallow place, buzzing in and out and filling up.

Intervention Lesson #72,329: I’ve been feeding thistle seed for years and run out on occasion without ever having a crisis. This morning, the thistle eaters have emptied a week’s worth of food in two days. By feeding them I’ve made them dependent on that source. Now trees full of fledgling pine siskins are desperate for seed I cannot provide on a Sunday morning in Crawford. The one store where I can get them in less than an hour’s drive doesn’t open until one. It’s ten a.m. I’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel to give them another two tablespoons. After that they must wait til after one.

So much to be done! Everywhere I look there’s no time to observe. Cheatgrass, Poa bulbosa, weeds, weeds, weeds to be removed, eradicated from certain zones, not altogether from the yard. Some with a weed-whacker, some by hand to protect the precious wild onions and the SCLI, which blooms in dainty yellow waves from the east side of the yard rolling through the fence into the woods. Schoenocrambe linifolia is a native mustard also known as skeleton mustard. The nickname SCLI comes from the botanical convention of combining the first two letters of the scientific name; if there are more than one plant with the same combination, they are named with a number following, for example PEPU7, another lovely yellow native plant whose bloom time has not yet come this season. I learned all this from my dear departed friend Gretchen Van Reyper, an enthusiastic plant expert who used to come every spring for a wildflower walk at least once, and regale me with the proper names for every plant we encountered. Yes, there were a lot! I have only retained about half of what she taught me, and with her now permanently gone, never to walk this way again, the knowledge both inspires and saddens me.

The early euphorbia donkey tail spurge continues to bloom. In looking it up to verify the name I find it is illegal to cultivate in Colorado and landowners are required to eradicate it! I didn’t know that. But I remember that the Delta County Weed Czar made me promise one time to never share it with another gardener.

The tiniest blue penstemons have opened, yesterday just buds, this morning tiny blue and purple corollas dazzle. Stanleya is up a foot high, five offspring from the original which I finally uprooted last year after it died, and one giant specimen that has crept up to abut the sagebrush. Golden currant moves from clusters of yellow blooms to approaching berries. The first Little Doctor columbine bud has appeared, the other blue penstemons are either in bud or beginning to bloom, pink penstemons are shooting up stalks, sturdy European pasqueflower continues to bloom and now spiky seedheads nod above the deep purple flowers. The first callirhoe blossom has opened, the vibrant crabapple has faded to soft pink as green leaves overtake the blooms.

Nepeta is ripe and buzzing with bees, in full and flagrant bloom all over the yard; honeybees as well as natives like this funny little creature that looks like a cross between a bee and a mosquito.

And the bees and bugs are back in full abundance with the flowers: