BLOOMING JOE-PYE

      For an hour one afternoon during this mid-August, I stopped driving to do errands to view several intermittent lines and clumps of tall, stately Joe-Pye plants standing in moist soil between a half-mile stretch of country road I was on and a nearby woodland edge.  Each stalwart Joe-Pye had at least a few whorls of elongated leaves at intervals on its stout stem.  And each Joe-Pye was crowned with a bushy head of many small, dusty-pink blossoms that were quite attractive in themselves.  Some of those flowers were being visited by a small variety of busy insects bent on sipping sugary nectar.  

     All those insects fluttering or buzzing, depending upon the kind,  among Joe-Pye blooms that day, had lovely color patterns that added to the beauties of the blossoms.  Those insects included monarch, tiger swallowtail and pearl crescent butterflies, and honey, bumble and carpenter bees.  The large monarchs had deep-orange wings, streaked with black, while the big swallowtails flapped bright yellow wings, again striped with black.  The small pearl crescents had orange and chocolate-brown wings.  And the big carpenter bees showed pale-yellow hairs on their thoraxes and had shiny, black abdomens.  

     Each of these insects has an interesting life history.  In March, the attractive monarchs leave forested mountains in Mexico to fly north.  Their children and grandchildren, in turn,  spread across the United States, laying eggs on milkweed plants, then dying.  Monarch larvae ingest milkweed leaves, pupate and emerge as beautiful, adult butterflies.  By early September, the handsome great-grandchildren of the monarchs that left Mexico that same year, flutter southwest across the States to the same trees on the same mountains in Mexico to winter where their great grandparents wintered.  Another miracle of nature, nobody knows how they find their way.

     Tiger swallowtail caterpillars feed on the leaves of a variety of woodland trees.  Therefore, one would see tiger swallowtail butterflies among flowers near the woods where they were larvae.  

     Pearl crescent larvae feed on the stems and leaves of aster plants in farmland and along rural roadsides.  Therefore, this kind of butterfly would be among blooms along country roads in farmland.

     Honey bees were imported into North America by colonists from Europe.  Multitudes of the sterile, female worker bees' jobs are to sip nectar from flowers, fertilizing them in the process, and making honey from the nectar they collected through each summer.  Some colonies of honey bees live wild in tree cavities.     

     Bumble bees are native to North America and live in small colonies in sheltered places.  They, too, pollinate blossoms and make honey from flower nectar. 

     Carpenter bees are a native, solitary species.  Each female chews holes in the undersides of dead tree limbs and wooden structures where they pack in small balls of nectar and pollen and lay an egg on each one.  Each resulting larva feeds on its provided food, pupates in its wooden tunnel and emerges as an adult bee ready to sip nectar and reproduce.  

     Joe-Pye flowers and the insects that visit them are attractive and intriguing, as are all species of life.  Watch for living beings wherever you may be.  They certainly are interesting and entertaining.