Wild flowers

I went up to New Hampshire a few weeks ago and took a few pictures of some wild flowers. Any identification would be great, all my aunts want to plant them in their gardens! I hope I get to go up their again soon, there are suppose to be wild lady slippers there. Also I took a picture of a purple flower on my house and a dandelion seed in some grass on the side of a sports field.

Flowers around town

Here are a bunch of flowers from gardens in my suburban town.

Time for a new post

Its been to long since my last post so here are some updates. First here are some ant pictures. I believe they are Formica aserva, witch is a species of slave-maker ant. It is still not positive on the i.d. because I don't have anything to make out the small feature that confirms it. If it is F. aserva, it would be able to survive with out slaves in the colony, but if it comes to a host species nest they may create a raiding party, infiltrate the nest, steal as much pupae as possible and return to the nest. Once in the nest some pupae are eaten while others are raised by the large aserva workers to hatch inside the nest. Once an ant becomes an adult it adopts the scent of the colony then believes she is the daughter of the slave-maker queen. The enslaved workers then feed and raise the brood of colony. Though they are slaves, they are treated like they are sisters and aren't really mistreated or abused in any way. The next picture is of a Bombus impatiens worker, witch is a species of bumble bee. I was lucky enough to catch it in midflight.

Found a young aerial yellow jacket queen.

Since I haven't seen much activity for Estella (other then some nest construction) I decided to post about this Dolichovespula arenaria queen. She just started her nest maybe 2 weeks ago and is almost done with here second layer of envelope. I have seen that in the nest she has a few larvae she must be feeding well and seems pretty healthy. I found an enemy queen bugging her though. While away from the nest a strange queen flew up to the nest hovering around it possible trying to decide if to usurp or kill the resident queen in a terrotorial battle. She may be nesting near by so that would cause an eventual fight or she could be nest less and trying to steal the nest by killing the queen and taking her first brood before workers arrive. (yes, lazy and grewsome) but as long as "my" queen is healthy and doesn't get over worked or bothered by the queen she should have a very good head start compared to other yellow jackets. The pics are in order from 2 days ago, yesterday and today so you can see how fast she works, the picture of a queen in flight is NOT the resident queen but a different color form of the same species. Instead of the pretty dots on the abdomen she had tear dropped shaped dots that connected to the black strips. With the second envelope her nest is maybe the size of a small egg. Its hard to estimate size from 6 ft above your head... Hope you enjoy the pics!

Wasp queens

I found these european paper wasp queens starting their first nests. The nest with three wasps actually has 4. They are sisters that are starting their first nest together. The queen nesting alone is very small for a queen but I hope she survives. I wll be keeping an eye on her so she will need a name, I am calling her Estella.

Bumble bee queen

I found a bush that was attracting all the young bumble bee queens so I took a few pictures.

Flowers

Here are some flowers that are starting to bloom.