A Bee & A Butterfly | Wildlife Wednesday

June has proven to be incredibly busy for work so any of the intermittent downtime I had in April and May has gone *poof*! Which is one reason my writing here has tapered off once again. I did want to share two little nature bits from the yard yesterday evening that I took with my phone. I still feel a little bit traitorous when taking “good” photos with my phone. Like, I should really go get the point and shoot at least, right? And yet there’s that convenience factor of shooting on my phone so I can easily upload and share and that wins out. The photos from my phone usually look decent on my phone and even with the iPhone10 having a better quality camera, I do notice differences in quality when compared with a point and shoot. I have no idea why I’m going on about this other than maybe to say, excuse the quality? The other problem I run into is if I take the dSLR out it will be a week or two (or month) before I get around to processing the photos. All this is to say, hey, look, I actually took photos recently and I’m going to share them here in a closer time frame reference!

First off, butterflies have been a bit quiet around here lately. We get a few every now and then but it hasn’t been busy for them in several weeks, maybe over a month. I’ve been enjoying the dragonflies and other insects when I see them. Now that I’m thinking about this, moths are also not very prevalent right now.

Tuesday evening we went out to the potting bench and I noticed a hairstreak fluttering around. It briefly landed on me, too. After I noticed it was not the average gray hairstreak I went to grab my phone to take a few photos. It was a Red-banded Hairstreak, Calycopis cecrops.

A little lepidopteran entertainment for a few minutes before I left it alone!

Out at the edible garden, where I sequester a few flowering plants from the deer, like these echinacea, I noticed a bee foraging on the flowers.

It is, I believe, a Two-spotted Long-horned Bee, Melissodes bimaculatus. It was annoyed a few times at us (me and Forest) but I managed to get a few decent photos.

Not sure what is driving this slow down in pollinators—the heat or lack of rain—which we just remedied that last one. Here’s hoping the tides will turn and more will be flying soon!