I like to photograph flowers, so when my wife asked if I wanted to join her on a hike in the Biocore Prairie with the Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, I cheerfully agreed. The actual focus of the hike was pollinators, but it was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and I figured if we were looking for pollinators it would make sense to start by looking for things that needed pollination. Flowers seemed like good candidates.
I got pictures of a few flowers, some with and some without pollinators, but it turns out that I also learned a lot about critters that like to hang out by flowers. If asked about bees, I might have guessed there were two kinds, bumble bees and honey bees. Turns out there are over 400 species of bees in Wisconsin! There are 13 species of the bumble bee alone. They are, as you probably know, the fat and fuzzy ones as opposed to the slim, less hirsute honey bees. Also, what I once thought were just baby dragonflies are actually damselflies. They’re thin and rest with their wings held closed while dragonflies are bigger and rest with wings held open.
As we all know, nature can be kind of cruel and this was demonstrated by a crab spider sitting on a Queen Anne’s Lace getting ready to suck the juice out of a fly. I never saw that in a Disney movie! On the happier side, it was nice to see several Monarch Butterflies flitting through the prairie flowers.
By the way, all of these photos were taken with a Canon 7D using a Canon 70-200 mm F/4L lens with a Canon 1.4x tele-extender. All were shot hand held using shutter speeds of 1/500 s or 1/250 s.
(Click on any photo to enlarge, then use arrows to scroll through the images.)