Tag: sunflowers
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Monarch, bees and a male hummingbird
I stepped out into our front garden this afternoon and was treated to a Monarch butterfly circling a patch of sunflowers, occasionally landing and sticking it’s tongue into the tiny disk flower that actually produce pollen, nectar, and ultimately, sunflower seeds. It seems as if we haven’t had as many bees this summer, which is…
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Patterns in Nature
I started off thinking this post was going to be about the fact that sunflowers make two different kinds of flowers, which I think is really interesting. When we think of sunflowers, we think of the big showy flowers around a central disk. But the disk is made up of flowers, too! And actually, the…
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Sleeping Bees
While I was out rummaging in the garden several mornings ago, I made a surprising discovery: I found a bee asleep in one of my hollyhock blossoms. You’ll have to take my word for it, I suppose. But you can kinda tell by the way she is deep inside the flower, and yet not gathering…
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Hearts in Nature
Many people collect images of hearts in nature. I found this prairie coneflower as I was looking for prairie falcons this morning. (Focus on What’s at Hand) This is what prairie coneflower normally looks like. Prairie coneflower is in the sunflower family. You can see it if you mentally flatten the cone down a…
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Mathematical Patterns in Plants
One of the things that I really enjoy about nature is that it produces proofs that it obeys natural laws in the most unusual — and beautiful — ways. This spring and early summer I ran across three examples of math in plants. Scorpianweed, like most plants in the hydrophyllaceae family, has a flower stalk…
Amy Law, Science Geek 