Our pretty blue wildflowers are open in all their glory in the morning. Such an intense blue color that they have.
The flowers are really popular with the bees. On this particular bunch there were several bees drinking up the nectar and gathering the pollen. In the picture below you can see a bee on a flower at the very bottom of the picture.
There are several more bees in the picture but they are a little bit harder to see. Fortunately for me they weren’t of the killer bee variety. They looked like just plain old-fashioned honeybees. But in the early afternoon when the bright sun is high in the cloudless sky making me a believer in global warming, the flowers close up (see picture below). I guess that they don’t like the heat either.
It’s amazing to me that plants have the power of movement. They know which way they want to move. For example if they want to close the flower, they do. When they want to move the petals to open the flower they can do that too. Sort of gives some credibility to the sci-fi classic Day of the Triffids. I have both read the book and seen the movie. Some of the old science fiction I really like. But these flowers keep opening and closing on a daily basis like most flowers. By the way, I now have four marigolds growing in my little cluster living in the tree stump. They are sharing the tree stump with some carpenter ants who are chewing up the stump which will eventually make the stump easier to get rid of. The tree was an old southern oak and the wood was so hard that when I took a chain saw to the top of the stump, I couldn’t cut more than about ¼ of an inch deep and it dulled my chain to where it would not cut any further. Plus the chain saw started to heat up from my efforts to cut into the oak stump. I gave up and now these carpenter ants are doing the job. Isn’t it amazing that the smallest of God’s creatures, the ant, can do what a big human with a mean powerful chain saw wasn’t able to do. I must admit that it is a little humbling. Have a good evening and don’t forget to watch the shuttle launch early tomorrow morning. I was going to say “bright and early” but the “bright” part wouldn’t apply at 5:40 am when it is still dark out. Lew
Was the pictures of the flowers taken with your new camera? They turned out very nice. The opening and closing of the flowers reminded me of a Venus Fly trap. I always found them to be interesting plants.
ReplyDelete