A Bee Jigs in Pollen

My cousin is here and we had expected it to rain today, which it did - ever so slightly in the morning - so we made other plans. After those plans we did go on out to TM for about 1/2 hour, just to look around. I saw enough to become frustrated. 


The butterflies were more than plentiful because it had cooled off from the light rain, and we were treated to a special sight: after watching a lone monarch dancing on the asters, another equally large orange butterfly joined it, and I could have had a shot of the two of them on the same clump in full glory. (I've since looked in my ID book and I think it may have been a gulf fritillary.)


Then a few yards down the path we saw another, 3rd, different large orange butterfly which posed perfectly for us. We also saw lots and lots of gray hairstreaks, skippers, blues and pearl crescents. They were all flitting about the asters in the lower meadow areas of the blue and the yellow. So many butterflies and no camera! Tomorrow we will return with the camera, if it doesn't rain!


This evening while playing ball with Eddie I noticed a bumble bee rolling around inside one of the rose of sharon (or whatever it is... I think I read it may be swamp mallow or something like that.) I looked around at others along the retaining wall and I saw 3 bees in all, in various stages of being covered with pollen.

 The bee danced the maypole with the... the... middle sticky-out part that had all the little pollen circles on it. I just asked my cousin, who has advanced studies in biology, specifically botany, and she went into full-blown scientific jargon lecture mode. I asked her one more time, please simply tell me what this part is called... then she began a verbal essay on how flowers can get quite complicated blah, blah, blah, and when I rolled my eyes she hollered out "ITS THE PENIS, THE PENIS!"

Any way, the bee stayed down in there, gradually moving around and around in order to cover its body with the pollen; since they end up carrying it as packed saddle bags on their thighs, the bee probably went somewhere to do the packing

 This is a same bee, just starting to fly out of the flower

 This is a different bee beginning to fly out

 And here is the 3rd bee, just starting his pollen-gathering work

I found a tiny leaf beetle on the only white sharon/swamp mallow I have, over in the other corner of the yard