Since Hurricane Idalia headed through our area we have had several afternoon showers in addition to the rain that the storm dumped on us. For some of our coastal areas all that rain was not a good thing (some areas are just beginning to recover from the flooding it brought), but up here in the sandhills it was a godsend. This has been an unusually dry summer. I wouldn’t say we’ve been in a drought situation, but we’ve been getting close. The interesting thing is that it’s just been this way in a fairly small part of the west coast of central Florida. That’s definitely an odd pattern. But I digress.

After we got some rain, our fall flowers started really blossoming. The plants themselves had been growing, but not getting enough moisture to actually flower. Now we have flowers everywhere! And the pollinators are also really happy. Just after the storm I went out into my yard to see what the blackjack flowers were attracting. There were several types of butterflies, some bees and wasps, and these cute little bee flies. I’m not sure what species they are because to identify that apparently you need to examine their wing veination, but I do know it’s in the genus Villa. There were quite a few of them helping themselves to an afternoon snack.

I like the little bee flies, not only because they’re cute, but they’re docile (but they can sting), and they’re very efficient pollinators. As you can see, they’re covered in little hairs that easily pick up the pollen and distribute it to other flowers. Even though they often hover while they eat, they’re small enough and get close enough to the flowers that they still contact the pollen. On flowers like these blackjacks that are actually made up of many small florets, they have to land so that they can probe each floret to fill themselves up. This particular one was caught doing just that. In the first photo, it was looking for a floret that was full of nectar. In the second, it has found one and was feeding, and in the third, it had finished and was headed to the next flower. It actually fed from several of the florets before it’s departure. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it and took quite a few photos, but I kind of liked the story that these three tell.