The number of summer days left this year are dwindling and autumn will soon be here. Some of the leaves on the trees in the high country have already begun to change color and down in the valley even the mornings are cooler. Not yet nippy but cool enough.

Rocky Mountain Bee Plant with a Bee, Box Elder County, UtahRocky Mountain Bee Plant with a Bee – Nikon D500, f7.1, 1/2000, ISO 640, Nikkor 500mm VR with 1.4x TC, natural light

On Sunday I was up in Box Elder County looking for birds but I also felt I had to stop and take some images of Rocky Mountain Bee Plants that were blooming along side the road. I was actually hoping to get a few images of the migrating hummingbirds at the bee plants but that wasn’t to be, the few that I saw stayed further away than I would have liked. There were plenty of bees hanging around though.

Did you know that there are about 900 species of native bees in Utah? A person could make themselves go bonkers trying to identify them all!

I want to call the flying bee in this image a honey bee, which is an introduced species, but it is missing the black stripes on the abdomen that are usually seen, so for right now I am not going to label it a honey bee.

What I did find interesting about this bee and several others that I scoped with my lens is that the pollen baskets on their legs contained green pollen instead of the yellow that I typically see and then I noticed that the pollen on the anthers of the bee plant is green so then it all made sense to me. Now I’m wondering what the honey made from the pollen of bee plant tastes like!

Life is good.

Mia

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