Furry bee on cowpen daisy

Even after three-and-a-half years I still occasionally show you species that haven’t appeared here before. That’s true of this furry bee, which I don’t know how to identify, as well as the flower head it’s on, which is a cowpen daisy, Verbesina encelioides. If the genus sounds familiar, it’s because frostweed, which you’ve recently seen here with a hover fly on it and doing its ice trick, is Verbesina virginica. To my untrained eyes the two species don’t look much alike, but I’ll have to defer to botanists on that.

I took this picture on October 28th in Guerrero Colorado River Park, a location that also makes its debut here today.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman