The Bees Have It

 

Yellow Thistle, Cirsium horridulum

Intriguingly, ominously, statuesquely, yellow thistles send up flower stalks in the second year of their biennial life, in some of the toughest terrain on Halibut Point.

A pregnant thistle rosette

The stalks ascend from spiny dinner plate-sized crowns that formed the previous year.

A bumblebee with pollen pouches already bulging

approaches a thistle

Thistle flowers attract certain species of bees fulfilling the mutual pollination bargain. Both bee and thistle have self-protective features that make people wary.

Bumblebee burrowing into a thistle flower

The anatomies of the bee and the plant uniquely support each other. No other orders of insects have developed a similar partnership with the local yellow thistles during my observations, although certain butterflies reportedly value these nectar-rich flowers. 

Western Honeybee

This bee's adaptations include specialized tastes, mouthparts, and foraging abilities within a forest of stamens.

Small Carpenter Bee

The thistle's appeal almost exclusively to bees is the mirror opposite of the daisy's eclectic pollinating appeal throughout the insect orders, that we have seen in the previous series of posts.

Bi-colored Striped Sweat Bee

The pincushion-like flower heads are packed with small disk florets.

Airborne thistle seeds

The blossoms give way to cottony white seed heads that shatter to the wind and float free-spiritedly to distant outposts where they sometimes become pariahs in pastures or people paths.

Goldfinch perched within a Canadian Thistle

All parts of the plants, including the seeds, have sharp spines. Goldfinches that thrive on them are undeterred and go about their harvests acrobatically as though scripting a fairy tale.