northeast-flora-and-fauna

There are a bunch of bees around here; this 1 is (probably) a Wilke's Mining Bee . (A very technical description is here .) This is not a native bee, though they've been over here for a long time. There's a theory that they made the trip over here within ship ballast. Not unlike European humans, they've spread out and thrived over here, probably at the expense of native residents [1]. Although these bees are known to like pollinating legumes like clovers and Bird's-foot Trefoil , that's not a hard-and-fast rule; this bee seems to be enjoying a Common Yarrow . Despite evolving on a different continent, they do have fairly close relatives in the US. We have mining bees  here, and all mining bees are in the same genus. They get their name from a tendency to dig holes in the ground, but they're not looking for precious metals; that's where the nests for their offspring will reside [2]. These bees were named by the 19th century entomologist William Kirby , bu...

Though most of the time my problem with taking animal pictures is getting an animal that doesn't want its picture taken to cooperate and stay still long enough for me to aim and focus. But once in a while the opposite problem occurs, where I'm trying to take one picture and something seemingly photobombs the picture. This happened twice a couple weeks ago. Sometimes the photobomb is a momentary inconvenience, but all too often the activity leads to the original subject and the photobomber fleeing from camera range. In this 1st one, I intended to get a picture of a Cabbage White butterfly on what I believe to be Birdsfoot Trefoil . Although I didn't think the trefoil was particularly popular with the pollinators, at least one butterfly was checking it out when another flew in. In this case the photobomb was probably about romance; the one with 2 dark smudges on the forewings is a female while the intruder with 1 smudge spot on its forewings is a male. (I have no idea if the...