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For those who want to know more:
1. This is a female carpenter bee visiting a datura flower. Datura flowers are open at night, so the carpenter bee has only a short time in the early morning to use this resource.
2. She dives to the bottom of the flower to drink nectar.
3. Then she wraps herself around the anthers, or male parts of the flower. She buzzes loudly. The vibrations cause the pollen to release and it powders her hairy body.
4. On to the next flower…
Just wanted to give my local readers a heads up:
The Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona is hosting David Roger’s Big Bugs sculpture exhibit again, starting in September. They have some ant-related events associated with the exhibit:
There will be a showing of the documentary Ants — Nature’s Secret Power on November 3, 2011 at 7-8:30 p.m., with a question and answer session by Dr. Bert Hoelldobler afterwards.
Kevin Haight from Arizona State University will present Ants in the Sonoran Desert on Saturday, October 8, 2011.
There is a fee for both programs above, the amount depending on whether you are a member of the garden or not.
Look for classes for children and a kid’s movie at the website as well.
Yesterday there was an interesting article at Wired Science, Marvelous Destroyers: The Fungus-Farming Beetles by Brandon Keim, with some wonderful photographs by Jiri Hulcr. Did you know that bark beetles and ambrosia beetles actually feed on fungi rather than the wood or bark of the tree they infest? The author makes a good point about how this relationship started out in dead trees, but has run amok when the beetles and their fungi were introduced to new areas.
The article got me thinking about leafcutter ants, which leads to a trivia question:
Do you know who the first naturalist was to figure out that leafcutter ants were eating fungi rather than leaves? I’ll give you a hint: it was in the 1800’s.
Leave me a comment or visit Wild About Ants at Facebook and take a guess. At the Facebook page you will also see a link to a very cute ant anatomy fail by a young girl.
