One of Laurie’s friends gave her some Rocky Mountain Bee Plant (Pertioma serrulata) seeds last year. Like the careful gardeners that she and I exemplify, she sprinkled them around the base of a newly-planted “Hot Wings Maple” and forgot about them.
Until this Summer, when one of the Rocky Mountain Bee Plants came into bloom. It’s gorgeous, and the bees and ants love it. Hence the name “Bee Plant”, I guess.
There are a lot of Honeybees on these flowers most days. Honeybees are probably the most common of the “large” bees.
The photo below is kind of a neat. It’s a close-up of a European Honeybee collecting nectar at one of the Bee Plant flowers. If you look just to the right of the bee’s right shoulder, on the flower petal, you can see a tiny, pale insect.
I’ve marked the tiny insect with a red arrow in the photo below.
That’s a Thrips. Some of these are garden pests, causing damage to plants directly or by acting as vectors for various viruses. Some are considered “beneficial”, because they do things like eating mites. I’ve got no clue what kind this one is, but I’m amazed at the disparity in the sizes of the Thrips and the Honeybee. The size of the bee relative to the Thrips seems close to our size relative to that of the Honeybee. It’s a fractal world.
A few Bumblebees come into these flowers too, but they are not nearly as numerous as the Honeybees.
There is also some Honeybee-sized type of solitary bee that comes to the Bee Plant flowers to collect pollen. I think it’s a Leafcutter Bee, but I’m not sure of that ID.
This bee hovers in front of the flowers and kicks at the flower stamens with its feet, presumably getting the pollen grains to land on its body. It looks like a boxer working a speed bag as it hovers, kicking at the stamens. I have never heard of this behavior before . I’ve not managed to get a photo of this behavior yet.
Another interesting “large bee” observation on this Rocky Mountain Bee Plant. Laurie found what looked like a “sleeping” bee on one of the flowers. The bee was holding onto the flower with a couple of its feet, and I think also with its mandibles. The bee was quite dead. I think was one of the native bees – a Leafcutter Bee, perhaps?
The bee came off of the flower quite easily. On the right side of the bee’s thorax, there were what looked like fungal outgrowths…I can’t tell for-sure from the photos.
I wonder if this is an entomopathic fungus, such as Beauvaria, Pandora, or the famous Cordyceps. That posture – locking onto an object, with legs and wings spread…I think it’s suggestive of a fungus.
Now I wish I’d gotten better photos. Very cool.
