Purple, green, yellow
While photographing some spiderwort flowers (Tradescantia sp.) in our side yard on April 1st I spotted a small iridescent sweat bee (perhaps Augochloropsis metallica) also making a visit. For a closer view of the non-human visitor, click the icon below:
Before the invention of lenses, probably no one had been able to see the details in a bee’s eye.
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The quotation in my previous post from David Mamet’s new book Recessional included an appropriately disparaging reference to the corrupt group Black Lives Matter, whose unsavory beliefs and practices I detailed here on July 23 of last year and on February 2 and March 18 of this year. The sordid saga continues. Last week New York magazine ran a story with the headline “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House” and subhead “Allies and critics alike have questioned where the organization’s money has gone.” The purchase of that house was in addition to the 10,000-square-feet, $8.1 million Toronto mansion that once served as the headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada, as well as co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s “real estate buying binge” in which she snagged four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the United States. Let’s hear it for Black Lives Matter’s championing of the downtrodden masses!
You can read the New York exposé to learn about the shady maneuvers the group went through to keep the public in the dark about who the owners of the mansion actually are. It’s true, after all, that Black Lies Matter.
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The New York magazine article also pointed out an egregious external measure to suppress the April 2021 article in the New York Post that revealed Patrice Cullors’s purchase of four homes for millions of dollars: “It’s currently not possible to share the Post’s article on Cullors’s home purchases on Facebook because the site’s parent company, Meta, has labeled the content ‘abusive.’” Of course in reality it’s Meta’s suppression of the truth that’s abusive.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Lovely post
Cuckoo
April 12, 2022 at 4:54 AM
Thanks. I needed go no further than my yard.
Steve Schwartzman
April 12, 2022 at 10:41 AM
Mardi Gras colors! That’s such a rich, deep purple. I rarely see spiderworts that color, and even more rarely see the pink, but they’re quite beautiful, and the bee is a perfect accent. He seems to be enjoying himself, snuggled up to the stamen as he is.
shoreacres
April 12, 2022 at 7:44 AM
I had no idea green and purple are Fat Tuesday colors.
I used to occasionally come upon very pale or even white spiderwort flowers; for whatever reason, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one. In this case, the bee was happy to be(e) there, and so was I.
Steve Schwartzman
April 12, 2022 at 10:49 AM
Yow! I had forgotten all about sweat bees! That one blends well with the flower, and in the enlarged option (thank you very much) it is stunning – all of those colors!
Playamart - Zeebra Designs
April 12, 2022 at 9:40 AM
So can I infer you don’t have sweat bees in Ecuador, or at least your region?
Because my camera takes big pictures, the half-megapixel versions I use in my posts often don’t do justice to the details in the originals. I felt like I had to include a close-up of the tiny bee to do it justice.
Steve Schwartzman
April 12, 2022 at 10:52 AM
Marvelous colors!
Eliza Waters
April 12, 2022 at 11:14 AM
Amen to that.
Steve Schwartzman
April 12, 2022 at 11:17 AM
The colors of Royalty! That sweet bee looks fabulous on that purple flower.
circadianreflections
April 12, 2022 at 1:51 PM
An earlier commenter said the colors of Mardi Gras. Yes, the iridescent green goes well with the purple. I wish I had clothing like that.
Steve Schwartzman
April 12, 2022 at 4:24 PM
I’ve long been fascinated by the green-metallic bees. I saw Agapostemons frequently in Omaha, while we were there (https://krikitarts.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/green-glorious-green/), but Augochloropsis is new to me. What a lucky bonus bug.
krikitarts
April 13, 2022 at 12:36 AM
I don’t think I ever saw an iridescent green bee when I was growing up on Long Island. Over the past two decades I’ve seen my share of them in central Texas and have had a good time photographing them. I suggested the genus Augochloropsis because someone in Austin who knows a lot about local critters recently showed a picture of one:
http://www.austinbug.com/survey/2022/survey3-31-2022.html.
Steve Schwartzman
April 13, 2022 at 7:17 AM