The rush milkweed is still flowering.
Every once in awhile a high-pitched sound travels through the air and one of these shows up.
If you are brave, get a bit closer.
It’s a tarantula hawk wasp, an important pollinator of milkweeds. You can read more about how they do it in a previous post.
These wasps are big and noisy and clumsy. They seem like flying dinosaurs. You can’t miss them.
Not far away is a quiet little bee that you might easily miss.
Look at that long antenna.
The bees with antennae almost as long or longer than their bodies are commonly called long-horned bees. They are important pollinators of a number of plants, but their legs aren’t long enough to pollinate the specialized milkweed flowers.
Still, they are just some of the many insects that benefit from milkweed flowers.
