some field observations

If you spend enough time looking at anything, I think, you see things you didn't see before and wouldn't have seen otherwise.

One thing I noticed the other day on my Abelia bush is that not just the big carpenter bees (which are too large to fit in the flowers), but also the honeybees, act as nectar thieves. ("Nectar thievery" is actually the term for it - the insect bites the top of the flower, up near where it attaches to the pedicel, and drinks nectar through the hole, while circumventing the whole pollination thing - so the bee benefits but the flower gets squat. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.) Then again, I think my abelia is some kind of weird hybrid that doesn't set fruit - at least, I've never seen it make fruit - so maybe the nectar thieves aren't such a big deal on it. But I've also seen things like butter-and-eggs (a relative of snapdragons) with tiny holes bitten in the flower where some bee grabbed a quick meal without fulfilling her contractual obligation. (Most bees, remember, are female. And the male bees mostly live to mate, so I'm not sure how much they eat)

I also noticed that some plants seem to attract a variety of pollinators - the thistles here (I THINK it's Cirsium discolor, but I have to look it up to be sure), which are not native and are even somewhat invasive in grazed fields, I've seen halictids and carpenter bees (both large and small) and honeybees and wasps and once a leafcutter bee feeding on. On the other hand, white prairie clover (which IS a native) seems to only attract a few species - or perhaps the one it attracts at a given point in time is aggressive enough that other pollinators avoid it. Last time I was out there it was tiphiid wasps (which have long, narrow, cylindrical bodies); most recently it was some kind of sand wasp (a species of crabonid wasp). One per flower, but really no other pollinators in sight in that area.

I also got to see an assassin bug in action - I'm pretty sure it was the species called a bee assassin (it was reddish). As I was watching to count "newcomer" wasps to the flowers, I noticed a bug grab a wasp and insert its mouthparts behind the wasp's head. The wasp struggled briefly and then was still. (The wasp was larger than the bug). I guess everything in nature has something else that eats it.

I also noticed, the other day (when out with my class), that smaller butterflies (like the folded-wing skippers) seemed to be "chasing" larger butterflies (I noticed it with buckeyes). I've seen smaller birds "mob" larger birds like crows and hawks, but that's generally because the larger birds might eat the young of the smaller birds. I have no idea if what I saw in the butterflies was a type of "mobbing" behavior (chasing the larger insect away from the nectar resource it was monopolizing?) because I kind of doubt butterflies have sufficient social organization and communication to do something like "mobbing." But it still kind of looked like it....