black bee, yellow bee

black bee, yellow bee,

orange butterfly and white --

sipping coneflower nectar

On one small patch of yellow coneflowers, I spot two kinds of bees and butterflies. Naturally, I recognize the yellow striped honey bee, the kind my friend keeps in square white hives, but the black bee is a bit of a mystery. 
          A little research reveals that the mystery bee is also a honey bee (Apis melifera), but the European dark bee, also called the German black bee, is a different subspecies from the Common or Western honey bee. The dark bee was actually the first honey bee brought to the Americas by Europeans in the early 1600s.
          In addition to the two kinds of honey bees, the yellow coneflowers (Echinacea paradoxa) are being visited by two kinds of butterflies, a tawny one with dark spots along the edge of its wings and a white one with an orange streak on its lower wing edge. The coneflowers, with their drooping golden petals and spiky crown, are obviously a favorite of both bees and butterflies. Both types of insects are able to probe deeply with their long proboscis into the spiky tubes that make up the flower's central disk in order to sip the hidden nectar.

yellow ray flowers

yellow ray flowers

on gray-headed coneflowers droop

by nature not heat

The Compositae are having their annual family reunion in the deer meadow. It's hot and parched in this patch of prairie grass, but the cousins are out in droves, hobnobbing in the slight breeze. The Compositae are composite flowers, so-called because each flower includes two different types of flowers called florets. Many tiny florets gathered together in the center of the flower head make up the disc. On a black-eyed Susan, the dark center of the flower head is actually a cluster of small disc florets. Yellow coneflower is sometimes called gray-headed coneflower because the disc flowers are gray until the florets open and change to brown. The disc flowers of purple coneflower are bigger than those of other coneflowers. What appear to be long petals surrounding the disc are actually ray flowers, each one attached to a pistil and thus considered an individual flower. Each of the florets of a composite has the ability to produce a seed. The composite cousins are similar, yet different. Yellow coneflower's rays droop and are longer and thinner than those of black-eyed Susan, while purple coneflower's rays are larger and pinkish purple rather than yellow. Nowadays, people are familiar with purple coneflower as echinacea, widely used for its anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-inflammatory properties. Many summer wildflowers take to the meadows in order to bask in the sunlight otherwise blocked in the woods by leaf canopies. They have adapted to the drying effects of sun and wind by having thin leaves, thick stems and deep roots to reach moisture. Even so, the ray flowers of all the composites are beginning to wither in this continuing heat and drought.