Monarch’s exploit many plants, not only milkweed. This specimen had just been laying eggs on milkweed leaves and had moved over to this Echinacea to stocky up on nectar.
Wild carrot (Daucus carota) after sunset
A pair of bumble bees at work inside a male squash flower – hopefully they will later find themselves in a female flower and be able to put the pollen to good use.
Facing off on the flowers of a wild carrot plant with an ant. Who will back down first?
I had some difficulty identifying this fellow but with a little external assistance pinned it down as a ‘Weevil Wasp’ … a future contributor to the 1000 Species Project when I have done some more reading up on them.
Photographers often sing the praises of “the golden hour” at sunset or “the blue hour” just after and they are worth making use of. However, I often find that to my eye, maybe not yours, the really interesting light is in the middle of a heavy shower of rain when there are no shadows, the light is diffused and the colours of flowers positively glow.
Homing in on a rose …
This week the moss on the waterfall has pushed up a forest of sporangia
Once known as Rosa rubrifolia … the flowers only appear for about a week but the hips at the end of the year are enormous.
R. glauca is a species rose, which is to say that the variety is unchanged from its original form in the wild. It is native to Europe and thrives in mountainous regions and in climates as frigid as Zone 2
