Photos of the Week – July 9, 2026

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Reminder: please join us this Saturday for the Platte River Prairies field day. RSVP by contacting Kate at kate.samuelson@tnc.org.

Kim and I both went up to the Niobrara Valley Preserve last week to help with that site’s annual butterfly count. Neil Dankert leads this count every year, as he has for most of the last 38 or so years. Check out his terrific website on Nebraska moths and butterflies here.

While I was at NVP, I found some time to do some photography. Looking back, it’s weird that I didn’t get a single photo of a butterfly, though I did photograph one moth.

Hairy golden aster and lead plant in Sandhills Prairie near the Niobrara River.

The butterfly count was on Friday but Kim and I stayed for an extra night so she could go for a run on Saturday morning and I could wander out with my camera. One of the first things I found on my sunrise walk was a couple clusters of male scoliid wasps. Female scoliid wasps feed on scarab beetle larvae, which live underground. Somehow, the wasps figure out where a larva is, dig down to it, and lay an egg on the hapless grub. The wasp larva then hatches out and eats the beetle larva before pupating and emerging from the ground as an adult wasp.

A male Scoliid wasp on its overnight roost with milkweed pollinia stuck to one foot.

The males don’t do any of that. They spend their time feeding on nectar and looking for females to mate with. Often, they do this with a bunch of other males. At night, they often congregate together to roost, either for safety in numbers, warmth, or some other reason we dont understand. I think the wasps I found are Scolia nobilitata but I’m not promising that’s true.

If you look closely at the wasp photo above, you can see the gummy candy-like pollinia of a milkweed plant stuck to its foot. Both adult male and female wasps of most (all?) species feed on nectar rather than other invertebrates (they eat invertebrates as larvae but not as adults) and end up as important pollinators of many flowers, including those of milkweeds. If you don’t know the incredible story of how milkweed is pollinated, you can read about it here.

This is a side view of the wasp shown ahead. You can see the pollinia in this photo, too (right side of the stick it is perched on).
Here’s a photo of part of the larger congregation of male wasps.

Prickly poppy (Argemone polyanthemos) was blooming during our trip, including a few plants right in front of the preserve office. On Friday, we had to wait for the vegetation to dry out before starting our butterfly count, so I took a few minutes to photograph the flowers and some pollinating visitors.

Pricky poppy flower
Metallic green sweat bee on feeding on pollen.
A cool-looking beetle, also apparently feeding on pollen.
Ambush bug nymph on black-eyed Susan.
Sand milkweed (Asclepias arenaria) flowers.

Lead plant was also in flower, and many different invertebrates were hanging out on the plants, including pollinators, herbivores, and predators.

Lead plant (Amorpha canescens)
A beetle feeding on the pollen and anthers.
A charming little moth.
Another moth, captured by a crab spider.
A robber fly
A flower longhorn beetle feeding on lead plant

Flower longhorn beetles of several (I think?) species were abundant last weekend, feeding on the blossoms of multiple wildflowers. I’ve only included a few of the many photos I took of them.

Flower longhorn beetle on upright prairie coneflower (Ratibida columnifera)
A flower longhorn beetle on bush morning glory
Bush morning glory (Ipomaea leptophylla)
Purple coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia)
The Niobrara Valley Preserve is near the eastern extent of ponderosa pine in Nebraska
Grasshopper exoskeleton (left after molting) on yucca leaves
Ants tending aphids (feeding on honeydew they exude) on fourpoint evening primrose
Hairy golden aster (Heterotheca villosa) and lead plant (Amorpha canescens)

In case you’re wondering, it was a mediocre day for butterflies. It feels like butterfly abundance has been relatively low on the prairies I’m familiar with this year. I’m not sure if that’s related to weather (I assume so?) and if it is, I don’t know what weather factor(s) are most relevant. It was an extremely warm, dry winter and spring and has been a wet summer. Both resident and migrant butterfly numbers seem low this year. Is this the case elsewhere this year?

Still, six of us found 28 butterfly species, including a number of at-risk species. Some of those included two-spotted skipper, regal fritillary, monarch, eyed brown, long dash, northern broken dash, little glassywing, dun skipper and coral hairstreak. Some years, we see large numbers of butterflies like orange sulphurs, common wood nymphs, and/or great spangled fritillaries, but not this year. We also didn’t find an ottoe skipper, which we’d hoped to see because the most recent Nebraska sighting was at NVP several years ago. Maybe next year…

Nectar Thieves

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I was trying to pay attention to the tour. We were at the Shaw Nature Reserve for the 2026 Grassland Restoration Workshop and learning about some great prairie and woodland restoration projects. I really was trying to stay tuned in. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop watching carpenter bees steal nectar from penstemon flowers.

Both the foxglove penstemon (Penstemon digitalis) and the carpenter bees (Xylocopa virginica) were all around us in big numbers. The bees were very active in their visits of flower after flower. Clearly, the nectar was worth acquiring.

If you’re familiar with penstemon flowers, one of their key characteristics is their tubular flowers. I often see pollinators of many kinds flying or squeezing their way into those tubes to get nectar, exiting again with pollen stuck to their bodies. The architecture of the flower is well-adapted to facilitating pollination. Of course, that only works if the pollinators follow the rules.

At first glance, it might look like this carpenter bee is just doing its pollination job. However, you’ll notice the bee is not inside the flower, but on top of it.

What the carpenter bees were doing was landing on top of the flowers and using their mandibles (~teeth) to cut two little slits in the base of each blossom. They’d then stick their tongues through those slits and access the nectar directly. Subsequent thieves visiting the flower used those same access slits and stole more nectar. Those other thieves included lots of carpenter bees, but also some bumble bees and honey bees, who seemed more than willing to use the same shortcut.

Here, you can see the bee’s tongue being inserted into the base of the flower to extract the nectar without doing the flower any good at all.
Here are the slits created by the mandibles of carpenter bees that give them (and other bees) direct access to the nectar inside.

Carpenter bees are known for this behavior, but they’re not the only ones. Bumble bees and honey bees, along with other bee species, sometimes do this as well. In some cases, they’re probably doing it because their body size or tongue length doesn’t give them any other way to get to the nectar. In other cases, I’ve seen some bees going about nectar acquisition legally and others (of the same species) taking shortcuts.

This carpenter bee’s eye contact shows how little shame they have about their larceny.

While half listening to our tour guide, I saw hundreds of penstemon flowers being robbed by dozens of carpenter bees. Bumble bees and honey bees appeared to be following the carpenter bees’ example as well. Not once did I see any pollinator insect go in the front door and pick up/deposit pollen. I’m sure it happened – I just didn’t observe it.

Nectar thievery is common but I don’t know of any examples of plants that are struggling because of it. My guess is that there are enough pollinators playing by the rules that the cheaters don’t have a major impact on seed production, but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who knows differently. Either way, I guess it’s an admirable adaptation on the behalf of the insects and, apparently, a big distraction for tour members who notice it happening around them. Apologies to our tour guide for my inattention.