Thirsty

[Carma Sue Henry]

To continue with the thirsty theme...  

One of our bird baths is a very shallow aluminum tray with a maximum filled depth of less than an inch. We sometimes top off a couple of times each day. It's very popular with the Chickadees, nuthatches, gold and house finches and some of the sparrows for drinking and bathing.  

All summer long it's also been a destination for yellow jackets and some smaller hover fly and wasp types.  In the last two days we've noticed a lot of honey bees come in for a drink as well.  I don't know if I've just not noticed them before or if this is seasonal. The potted mint is about done blooming but there are still a few remnants so honey and bumble bees are still able to work them a bit. We haven't seen any bumble bees drinking.  

Clinging to the very outside edge seems to be the preferred method for all of the insects.  Occasionally I've fished out a yellow jacket that got in too deep.

Carma Henry

[Don A Boucher]

Thanks Carma,

Lisa and I are covering yellow jackets and paper wasps for our next newsletter. I've been doing a deep dive into their ID features in order to illustrate them. This one here looks like a Western Yellow Jacket (Vespula pensylvanica) and is our most common ground-nesting species. I can tell because her eyes are completely surrounded by yellow. Even though the Latin name is pensylvanica, the species is not found any where near Pennsylvania. The name is a holdover from a 19th century taxonomy scheme that confused this species with others on the continent. Somehow, when the taxonomy was corrected in the 20th century, this western species kept its Pennsylvanian moniker.

-Don Boucher