Summer Nectar 1 - Sunflowers

Helianthus divaricatus, Woodland Sunflower

Tucked within the name of Halibut Point's native sunflower is 'divarication', which means branching and spreading but sometimes with an inelegant sense of sprawling. Happily for Park visitors and pollinators Helianthus divaricatus divaricates through the moors holding golden flowers above the tangled briers and shoreline panorama.

Cabbage White butterfly

This sunflower has attracted a variety of butterflies in what has otherwise seemed a slim year for everybody's favorite insect.

Little Glassywing

American Copper

Monarch

Pearl Crescent butterfly and Bumblebee

The sunflowers provide nectar to an eclectic group of pollinators. Interestingly, this very seldom includes honeybees, but various native bees relish the offering. 

Furrow Bee, Halictidae

Plaster Bee, Colletes inaequalis

Small Carpenter Bee, Ceratina

Metallic Sweat Bee, Halictidae

Some bee look-alikes in the Flower Fly family Syrphidae also show up for the banquet.

Toxomerus geminatus

Epistrophe grossulariae

Syrphus torvus

Eristalis transversa

None of these nectar-seekers is bothered by wasps that join in the nutrition-for-pollination barter with the plant, although many wasps hunt other insects as food for their developing larvae.

Ammophila nigricans, Thread-waisted Wasp

This Thread-waisted Wasp has paralyzed a caterpillar larger than itself, that it is carrying off to feed its young in a burrow.

The wasp deposits eggs in the still-living caterpillar. As its larvae develop they slowly consume their slowly dying host.

Meanwhile the plant, which originates the cycle by converting solar energy to organic life, displays its sunflowers to the pollinators that help perpetuate it.