last week's flowers & insect life (as promised, something a little more cheerful)

[thanate]

We're official! Yes, I did zip-tie this sign to the fence. But never mind that-- have some weird alien flowers!


Monarda, also known as Bee Balm; I have some in pale lavender in the side garden, too. The camera thinks that every picture I've taken in the last two weeks or more is out of focus, and admittedly it did have a smudged lens for a while, but this didn't look any less in focus before I cropped it down, either.


Also, we have pollinators! I've seen some lovely dark-morph swallowtail sorts of butterflies, but only the bees seem to hold still long enough for me to photograph them. This is a bumblebee, on butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) which is the smallest of the three plants you usually see from the milkweed family. If someone tries to sell you butterfly bush to plant on the eastern US, tell them you want this or swamp milkweed instead. (Butterfly bush is from someplace in Asia, invasive here, and only provides nectar, rather than feeding the caterpillars who grow up to be butterflies.)


Several seconds later.


This is a honeybee, also on the butterfly weed.


And this is some other kind of bee that is probably native, on a small sunflower-- I'm pretty sure it's thin-leafed (Helianthus dedapetalus) but the tag has gone missing. At any rate, it's a cheerful blooming-its-heads-off sunflower that comes up all bushy-like to about my shoulder.


Also, in slightly older history, the largest of the praying mantises I rescued from the wrong side of window screens last month. It's about 1.5" long, and I still have the shed it had just cast off; we've seen a couple of 3" size mantises running about outside more recently, so they look to be doing pretty well.

In slightly more disturbing news, grauwulf says the idiot neighbor claims to have dug up a cache of eggs out of his backyard last week sometime, and apparently he thought the appropriate thing to do with carefully buried presumably-reptile eggs was to take them inside and put them in his incubator. (Why does he even have an incubator??) Today, I caught one of the young redtails carrying off some of the gardening equipment he leaves lying all over his backyard, and I was uncharitably amused.

This week's pictures include black-eyed susans (state flower of MD, and not actually quite native here, though they're close enough to be beneficial), swamp milkweed, garden phlox, and how to sex flowers on the birdhouse gourd that's trying to eat the porch screen, but at the current rate of posting, you're unlikely to see those until next week at the earliest. Maybe I'll even post about something else before then! Crazy.

Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.