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 – 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
Click here to see more of my flower, shrub and tree photos. Click here to see my insect and spider galleries.
Great shot. Eat that honey, and you will have had your greens.
It’s nice to see a bee at a bee plant. Fabulous shots of the pollen baskets too.
Incredible shot with a fascinating narrative. The colors are gorgeous and the detail is amazing. Thanks Mia.
Beautiful plant and busy worker.
And yes, I wonder about the taste of the honey too.
Fabulous image. The plant intrigued me so looked it up. Now to find a species that will grow in AR. Here is a link about it. https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=CLSE
Beautiful. I have been seeing huge clumps of rocky mountain bee plant this year. I have always called it cleome. I thought it was a perennial because in my parents yard it always came back in the same location. I was surprised when I did a bit of reading about it this year and found it was an annual.
Sometimes (a lot of times) your photos take my breath away. This is one of them. Oh, my!
Cool shots Mia
Transcendent!
Beautiful image and fascinating commentary (especially the green pollen!)