Pollinators and flowers – Brennah's Backyard

Spring Ephemerals Series #6

Maianthemum canadence

Canada mayflower is another maianthemum. Unlike the other wildflowers in these posts, this one seems to be a new arrival here. I don’t remember seeing it until the year before last, and then I wondered what it was because it was quite small and didn’t flower and didn’t seem to grow into anything (it just faded away as the summer went on, as spring ephemerals do). I suspect they may have sprouted from seeds that year which would explain why they were so small and didn’t flower, but there are several patches of them around that seem to have all come up in unison… So I’m not really sure what the story here is, but I’d like to be able to find out more about it.

This was about the extent of the plants’ growth in the first year.

These wildflowers may be a new arrival to my little patch of woods, but they aren’t uncommon in general, so although I don’t think the ones here have produced any berries yet, I have had opportunities to see and photograph the berries. The berries have a similar spotted look as they’re ripening to solomon’s plume berries, but they grow in smaller unbranched clusters.

This patch of nearly ripe berries is growing among sphagnum moss plants near the shore of Lake Superior. (The berries in the other photograph were also growing near the shore of Lake Superior, among some harder to identify moss.)

Canada Mayflower in full bloom in the woods.

Clearwing Moths

A couple of unusual and interesting moths in my area are the closely related hummingbird and snowberry clearwing moths. Both fly during the daytime, and hover in front of flowers they visit in a way that resembles a hummingbird sipping nectar. They also (as their name implies) both have large clear patches on their wings.

When I first spotted one of these moths (years ago now) I identified it as a snowberry clearwing. After that I began to assume all the large, clear winged moths I saw were the snowberry clearwing, but recently, going through and trying to identify various things I’d photographed, I realized I couldn’t remember what the difference between the two species was. I looked them up again, and realized that I’ve actually seen and photographed both (and there are actually a couple more less common species I haven’t seen).

The most obvious difference between the two species is that the snowberry clearwing has a black stripe running through the white patch on the head and ‘chest’ that meets the front pair of legs, which are also black, while on the hummingbird clearwing that patch and the front pair of legs are all consistently white. There are some subtle differences in the wings of the two species, but otherwise, both show a fair amount of variety in their colors and markings.

Though I think I’ve seen the snowberry clearwing most often, the best pictures I’ve gotten yet are of the hummingbird clearwing. But whichever species they are, they’re always beautiful and fun to see.

Hummingbird clearwing foraging on bee balm

Snowberry clearwing on oregano flowers. This is one of my older photos but it shows the stripe quite well.

Spring Ephemeral Series #5

Hairy Solomon’s seal

Solomon’s seals’ most obvious difference from the false Solomon’s seals (maianthemums) is that their flowers hang from the central stem instead of growing from the tip of the stem. I’ve found these sprinkled around the woods, but they definitely don’t grow in thick patches like some of the other wildflowers.

Solomon’s seal flowers with wild geraniums in the background.

Last spring I noticed that the leaves look quite interesting when they’re unfurling, which actually made them stand out even more from the maianthemums for me.

Spring Ephemeral Series #4

Solomon’s Plume

Maianthemum racemosum aka solomon’s plume is larger and has larger flower clusters than starry false solomon’s seal, but it doesn’t spread as vigorously, so I don’t find it in such dense patches. I find this species particularly fun to photograph, and the flowers aren’t even the main draw for me. I do have one particular photo of the flowers that is one of my favorites, though:

The out of focus leaves in the background are of a different plant of the same species, which is part of what I like about the photo. The first photo I used is also an old favorite of mine, showing the developing flower cluster with wild geraniums in the background. But a lot of the pictures I’ve taken are of the leaves, which have much the same alternating, zigzagging pattern as their relatives, but with an extra wavy edge to the leaves.

It usually blooms slightly out of sync with the other ephemerals, and only has a cluster of buds when the others are at their peak. I still like seeing it mixed in with the wild geraniums, though.

It also has a distinctive speckled pattern on the underripe berries, which it shares with a few other maianthemum species, but is otherwise unique as far as I know. And because they have particularly large flower clusters, they also have larger clusters of berries.

I rarely see the berries fully ripe, so I’m sure they are appreciated by the woodland creatures as well.

Spring Ephemeral Series #3

Here’s another one of the spring ephemerals:

White Baneberry

White baneberry is a larger individual plant than most of the spring ephemerals, but there’s only a couple of them in the woods. This species is also called doll’s eye because the poisonous berries look like doll eyes.

It was absent from the main ephemeral display last year because the spring brought a variety of inclement weather, including a warm period followed by some hard freezes and that seemed to get the better of this plant. Fortunately, after checking on it later, I saw that the plants had berries coming along on them, so they must have bloomed at some point (there are no paths to that spot, so I don’t get back there super often… and it seems even more inaccessible lately since some big branches have come down). There was one year, though, where I managed to get some cool pictures of it with wild geraniums coloring the background… which turned out to be a surprisingly awkward angle to try to get. (Shooting from a standing position was too high an angle, and from crouching was too low…)

Spring Ephemeral Series #2

Here are a couple more of the woodland spring ephemerals for you:

Maianthemum Stellatum

These are possibly the second most numerous wildflowers in our woods, (though the unobtrusive euonymus flowers are also a possibility) and they tend to spread and grow in thick patches. There seem to be quite a lot of common names for this species, but I don’t like any of them. They’re pretty much all false something, and also overly long. The one I’ve heard most frequently is starry false Solomon’s seal. Sometimes I call it starry maianthemum, though I did just make that up.

Like the other members of its genus the arrangement of the leaves on their slightly zigzag stem give them and interesting pattern to try to capture in my photography.

They also have neat looking berries as they’re ripening up. (So much so that I’ve posted about maianthemum berries specifically before!)

And the flowers are appreciated by a variety of insects. Here’s a longhorn beetle enjoying the maianthemum flowers.

Euonymus obovatus

Euonymus obovatus is a small plant that creeps across the ground, largely hidden from view by the other ephemerals. It is another that I don’t much like the common name- running strawberry bush. (I believe it’s named after another plant called strawberry bush… but still.) I don’t have a lot of good photos of this one since it tends to hide in the shadows, but it is an interesting looking little plant. it was about the last of the ephemerals I managed to identify so I don’t know a lot about this one either.

Wasp Watching

The past year turned out to be a good one for getting wasp photos for me, particularly this past August. When the first of the goldenrod started to bloom these plants turned into magnets for pollinators of all sorts, but I particularly noticed a lot of wasps, not just in numbers of individuals, but in diversity of species as well.

Before that, wasps had been congregating on the spotted horse mint / spotted bee balm (both common names for monarda punctata) in the pollinator garden by the house. I was having fun seeing how many different kinds I could spot as well as just appreciating their many different shapes and colors… but as I realized going through them later, even some very similar looking ones turned out to be different species.

I wanted to show off in this post some of the wasp variety I’ve been able to photograph through the years, though of course what I’ve managed to photograph is just a tiny sampling of what exists (there are some truly wild looking wasps out there, of which I’ve managed to photograph only a few). Also some of these photos are ones I’m more satisfied with than others.

The northern paper wasp (polistes fuscatus) has a significant amount of variety packed into one species. Their varied colors and markings make them fun subjects, plus I was starting to notice what seemed to be the same individuals hanging out on the same flower patches each day when I was doing really regular wasp walks.

This is a type of oak gall wasp laying eggs in an oak bud. Oaks are hosts to an impressive number of gall wasps, as well as other gall making insects which is part of why oaks are considered such important members of their ecosystems.

five banded thynnid wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

The common name of this wasp is the gold-marked thread-waisted wasp (which sounds more like a description of the wasp than a name… but at least it’s an accurate description!) These are certainly interesting looking creatures, but I’m not particularly happy with most of the pictures of them I have so far. Fortunately they don’t seem to be a rare species so hopefully I’ll be able to get some better pictures at some point.

grass carrying wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

This tachytes wasp (a genus known as sand-loving or green-eyed wasps) was quite mesmerizing, with both the green eyes and silvery stripes on the wasp’s abdomen being very shiny and reflective. The stripes even seemed to change color depending on the angle and lighting. These were also fast moving wasps, which probably exaggerated the reflective characteristics and made the wasp seem to shimmer in the sun. It also made it that much trickier to get good photos…

The four-toothed mason wasp is a fairly common species, and I’ve photographed them before, but this particular little guy gave me the opportunity to get the best pictures I have of this species.

The same wasp (I have quite a few pictures of him).

bald faced hornet enjoying the goldenrod.

This wasp was so tiny you might assume it’s a fruit fly if you see one… and this isn’t even as tiny as wasps get!

Great black digger wasp on swamp milkweed.

This mason wasp (euodynerus crypticus) may not have a common name, and there doesn’t seem to be much information about them out there. What little I was able to find piqued my interest, though; apparently it may be a social wasp, which I hadn’t heard of in the mason wasp family before. In any case, this species was regularly visiting the spotted bee balm, so I got to see them regularly for a little while.

Some sort of ichneumon wasp on the back of my hand. I found this wasp halfway through December!

Many species of solitary wasps, like this rusty spider wasp, specialize in hunting a specific type of prey that they will cache in a nest for their offspring. In the case of spider wasps, they specialize (as their name implies) in hunting spiders. I noticed one of these wasps hanging around the entrance to the garage one day, and then she disappeared into the garage for a while and I lost track of her, only to later spot her dragging a huge spider out!

Black giant ichneumon wasp on a dead tree.

four-banded stink bug wasp excavating a nest in sand. This wasp is also named for what they specialize in hunting.

Great black digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

A close up of the black giant ichneumon wasp. These wasp are a challenge to photograph because they’re just so long. They don’t fit in the frame well.

Myzinum maculatum is another wasp that doesn’t seem to have a common name, but they are closely related to the other thynnid wasps in this post.

Common thread-waisted wasp. I think this wasp had an injured wing, sadly.

Great golden digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

Four banded stink bug wasp on flat-topped goldenrod.

I found this cuckoo wasp at a local park. When I’ve seen cuckoo wasps before they’ve been pretty skittish, so I was happy to finally find one that was cooperative!

This picture shows the cuckoo wasp (the same one from the previous picture) between my knuckles, which shows how small this one was.

I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of wasps I can find this year!

Spring Ephemeral Series #1

Towards the end of May (roughly) is when all the spring ephemerals in the woods flower each year. It is an impressive display, but it is fairly brief. (You could say it lives up to the name ephemeral, I suppose.) I wanted to make a post about it, but with multiple years worth of photos, it was turning out fairly long, so I decided to make it a little series instead, and just spotlight one or two of the different species I’ve observed per post.

Wild Geranium

Wild geraniums are the most numerous of the spring ephemerals in our woods, which is part of their charm; it would be hard not to be impressed by the way they quite literally carpet large areas of the woods. I’ve tried many times over the years to capture a good sense of this in my photos, but although I’ve made some improvements and gotten some good photos, I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing will quite compare to seeing it in person. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to do the best I can with it.

Like quite a few native wildflowers, wild geraniums have at least one specialist pollinator: the cranesbill miner bee (cranesbill is another name for the wild geranium). Being specialist pollinators means that these bees will only use wild geranium pollen for feeding their offspring, though the adults may visit other flowers for nectar.

This is probably a cranesbill miner bee (I am at least certain that this is some type of miner bee), but miner bees can be very difficult to identify to the species.

Of course wild geraniums also provide nectar and pollen to a variety of other non-specialized pollinators too, like this agapostemon (sweat) bee.

This certainly won’t be the last you see of the wild geraniums in this series; they show up alongside the other ephemerals in many of their photos, too.

Last Aster Standing

Back in 2021 we started some native wildflowers from seeds. Since they are perennials they didn’t really fill out until the next year, though a few plants produced a scattering of flowers in their first year. One of of the species we planted was the aromatic aster. I chose it because it was supposed to be an especially late blooming and drought tolerant species (we’re mostly in a wetland, but had one dry area to plant) and by early November of last year it was the last aster still blooming. (To be fair, the most exuberantly blooming plant was in a favorable spot for soaking up late day warmth, and nicely mulched, which does help extend the growing season.) It was also one of the last few flowers blooming in general, so not surprisingly, it attracted the attention of all the remaining pollinators and concentrated them in a small patch of flowers. In particular, the asters were covered in bumble bees.

It was pretty easy to get some good pictures of the bumble bees since there were a whole bunch of them and they didn’t seem at all concerned about having a camera right next to them.

So many bees concentrated together in this patch sometimes led to bees foraging in close quarters…

These two got a little too close, and are trying to fend each other off here.

This little halictus bee also wasn’t too comfortable with having a big bumble bee wandering up behind him.

Another halictus bee resting on a flower. She hung out on this flower for quite a while.

There were a couple of drone flies hanging out in the midst of all the bees. Drone flies are a type of hover fly, also known as flower flies (and both names are quite accurate).

After the encounter with the bumble bee this halictus bee decided to groom himself and have a little rest, giving me a particularly good opportunity to take his portrait.

There were a few of these tiny, colorful agapostemon bees darting around. They’re tricky to photograph because they’re fast, but I noticed they would pause and rest every once and a while, so I managed to get a couple nice pictures of them.

The Many Moods of Prunella Vulgaris

Heal-all (also known as prunella vulgaris as well as a bunch of other names) is a common plant, and I frequently walk past it any time I’m out and about. Sometimes it catches my attention and I take pictures.

The flowers are probably the most likely part of the plant to catch someone’s eye (and yet this is the only picture of the flowers I picked to share). In this case it was the neat ring the flowers were arranged in that got my attention.

This is heal-all in late December. Recognizing plants in winter when they’re dormant adds an extra bit of challenge. This photo I like because of the water droplets inside the dried flower structure.

This one (taken on the same day as the last photo) shows a part of the plant I thought was pretty cool looking. It seems to be sort of like a shelf at the base of the flower cluster.

This one was taken in late summer and shows the flower cluster after it has dried up.

It’s interesting to see how different plants change throughout the seasons and which ones catch my attention in the winter.