March is a wonderful month for bee watching in the Sonoran Desert.
Seems like every flower has a bee visiting.
Sweat bees seem to like the lemon blossoms.
Penstemons appeal to digger bees.
Fiddleneck (Amsinckia intermedia) is also a favorite.
No, that isn’t a bee. Flies like fiddleneck, too.
All these photographs were taken within a half hour in our back yard. The bees are very busy!
Do you have bees flying where you live?
What do you see in this photograph?
Do you see a dark-colored bee sitting in a flower? Look again.
Can you see the red critter across from the bee?
That is a mite, a small spider relative with eight legs.
A few weeks ago I attended a conference, and a question came up a whether these large red mites on flowers are harming the plants. Are they a type of plant-feeding mite?
At the time, I thought the red mites were the same ones I often see rapidly running around on plants and in the compost heap. Those mites eat the eggs and immatures of insects and other arthropods. They are predatory. Some are called predatory running mites, genus Anystis.
In the desert, there are velvet mites (Family Trombidiidae) that are red. Some are over a quarter inch long, which is giant for mites. Velvet mites are also predatory, mostly on insects such as termites and ants.
The mite in the photograph above, however, seems to have it’s head in one of the flowers (this type of composite “flower” is actually a group of tiny flowers clustered together.) The mite doesn’t seem to be going after the bee at all.
Curious, I decided to do some research. After poking around, it seems the mite in the photograph is likely to be a member of the genus Balaustium. These mites are predatory in the young stages, but also feed on pollen as adults. Of course, feeding on pollen doesn’t harm the plants. The bees take loads of it.
Sometimes the mites are found clustering together in the spring. No one knows for sure why.
I wonder why they are so brightly colored?
Have you ever seen red mites?
The weather is warming, the sun is shining. Time for insects!
The tiny brown slivers in this flower are actually thrips. The easiest way to see them is to dump a flower upside down onto a white piece of paper.
If you have a microscope, look at the wings of adults. Thrips have a fringe of hairs on their wings.
I tried to get a better photograph with a doubler, but it was too windy. The flowers were bobbing around.
Caught a great photograph of a honey bee with it, though. I wonder how they interact with thrips.
Have you ever seen a thrips?
(Trivia: Thrips is unusual because both the singular and plural forms are the same word: thrips.)
For more information, see Roberta Gibson Writes.
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