Saturday, July 25, 2009

Bees on Winged Sumac


Yesterday's trek through a poorly guarded construction sight was worth the risk of getting caught. I saw a lot more winged sumac plants that way and I'm happy to say I found lots of bees working the flowers just as I saw two years ago. Last year unfortunately, there was a storm and all of the flower buds were removed from the plants, so no bloom. What wasn't there two years ago though was the great diversity I saw.


It's hard to find a cluster of flowers on this plant that doesn't have at least 2 bees working it. The vast majority of these though were all Honey Bees, Apis mellifera. There were no digger bees, potter wasps, scoliid wasps, leaf cutter bees, hunting wasps, and so on. There were some Bumblebees but not a whole lot.







The closest thing I saw to a digger or leaf cutter bee.


Some sort of fly. I've seen one of these in my yard earlier today.

The only thing I can think of for this drop off of native bees was the time of day I took these photos. I remember from two years ago that after 4:00pm there were almost no bees working these plants at all. I took them around 3:00pm. So I'm going to try and go again around 12:00 noon and see if I can get anything better. Unfortunately there are going to be construction workers around so this might not be the best year to do it. My Ninjutsu isn't what it used to be.