Tag Archives: prairie clover

HOLD STILL!! Photographing Bees for Fun and Frustration

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Photography is easy.  All you have to do is invest in a really good camera and be in the right place at the right time. 

Or at least that’s what I’m told by people who aren’t photographers. 

I always respond that while it’s important to have good lenses and an adequate camera, equipment is actually a pretty minor part of good photography.  The most important quality of a photographer is the ability to recognize and take advantage of various lighting conditions. 

…It doesn’t hurt to have patience and perserverance either.  Just last week, in fact, I was trying to photograph bees on prairie clover and used up almost all the patience and perserverance I had with me at the time.  I thought some of you might enjoy seeing how many of my photography days go – instead of just seeing the final photos I select from the hundreds of rejects.  Those of you who are photographers will probably emphathize with me, and those of you who aren’t will get a window into the process.  All of you will probably have a good chuckle at my expense.  So be it – it’s a holiday, after all – have some fun.

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The thing about bees is that they never seem to hold still. It’s not just that they keep crawling around a flower – they move REALLY FAST!

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I’ve got lots of photos just like this from about 15 minutes of trying to get one stupid photo of a honey bee. There were hundreds of them buzzing around a big patch of prairie clovers, and they weren’t hard to get close to. They just never stopped MOVING.

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With insects, and really all animals, it’s critically important to get the eye(s) in focus, because that’s where the eye of the viewer is drawn. If the eye isn’t sharp, the photo is pretty much junk. So there I was, trying to focus on the eye of a bee that was flying and crawling around flowers like it was hyped up on Mountain Dew. Oh, and there was a good wind blowing the flowers around too. That was fun.  In this photo, I didn’t manage to get ANYTHING in focus – mainly because the flower and bee were both moving too fast.

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I was using two legs of my tripod to stabilize the camera, and then leaning in and out toward the flower, trying to find the right focal distance (it seemed easier than trying to turn the focus ring on the lens while trying to catch up to a moving subject – and autofocus was zero help… much too slow.) Whenever I was anywhere close to focused, I’d snap the shutter, hoping it would work. It usually didn’t work very well. Ifn fact, sometimes the bee would leave the flower completely between the time my brain said shoot and my finger pushed the button…

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For a while, I switched over to bumblebees, but that didn’t really go any better…

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I did eventually manage to get a decent shot of the backside of a bumblebee. This is the exception to the rule about getting the eye in focus. If you can’t see the eye, it doesn’t matter… In this photo, the important part to be sharp is the pollen basket on the bees right side – and it’s pretty good.

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Finally, I managed to get one sharp photo of a honey bee.  Though much of the bee is a little fuzzy (so to speak) the eye is reasonably sharp, and so is the flower.  You can click on the photo to see a clearer image if you want to.  Out of about 15 minutes of photography and a couple hundred frames, I ended up with three decent bee photos (including the bumblebee’s back side). 

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Since I was running out of both memory card space and patience, I switched over to easier (slower) targets. Soldier beetles are still abundant, and apparently like to take their time and enjoy their meals a bit more than bees do. I think I got three or four good soldier beetle photos out of eight or ten tries. 

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…And of course, crab spiders are always dependable subjects when I’m looking for something that sits still. …I hope this one caught a couple honey bees after I left. That’ll slow ’em down…

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Cascading Impacts from Prairie Management – Fire, Cows, Mice, and Prairie Clover

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Several years ago, I was walking through one of our restored (reconstructed) prairies in early August, scouting for prairie clover seed harvest sites with one my technicians.  About a week earlier, we’d seen an abundance of prairie clover blooming in the same prairie, so we were coming back to see whether it was going to make seed or not.  The prairie was being patch-burn grazed, so a portion of it was unburned and was being largely ignored by the grazing cattle while another portion had been burned that spring and was being grazed fairly intensively.  We started walking through the unburned portion and were immediately struck by the absence of prairie clover seed heads.  There had been a lot of prairie clover flowers here just a week before – where did they go?  Finally, we found the seed heads we were looking for, but they weren’t on the plants anymore – they were on the ground (see photo below).

Prairie clover seed heads were scattered around the ground in the unburned portion of our restored prairie. These two happened to be on bare ground, which was convenient for photography.

We decided that some mice or other small mammals were clipping the flowers from the plants and eating the tender young seeds.  Nearly the entire crop of seed heads appeared to be on the ground – apparently, we weren’t the only ones who recognized the abundant supply.  We chalked it up to a fun ecological lesson and decided we’d look elsewhere for that year’s prairie clover seed harvest.  Rather than leaving right away, though, we decided to continue our walk toward the burned portion of the prairie to see how things were looking.

As we crossed the line where our firebreak had been that spring and entered the burned patch, we stopped in surprise.  We were surrounded by prairie clover plants with intact seed heads!  Just a few feet away from the unburned patch where prairie clover seed heads were scattered around the ground, we were now standing in prairie where every prairie clover plant was loaded with flowers (and the seed looked like it was going to be great.)

An example of a burned/grazed patch of our restored prairie being managed with patch-burn grazing. The light stocking rate we were using allowed cattle to concentrate their grazing almost exclusively within the burned patch of the prairie, but also to be very selective about the plant species they eat - choosing grasses over wildflowers.

After some discussion, we came up with what I’m sure is pretty close to the real story of what was going on.  You’ve probably already figured it out…

In the unburned portion of the prairie where there was little or no cattle grazing, the vegetation was pretty thick.  Mice were able to clip the prairie clover heads, pick them apart, and eat the seeds in the relative safety of that dense vegetative cover.  However, in the burned portion of the prairie, most of the grass had been grazed by cattle, and although the cattle had left most of the wildflowers ungrazed, the result was relatively sparse cover.  Here, any mouse foraging for food would feel very exposed and vulnerable to hawks or owls that might also be out foraging – enough so that they’d apparently decided the risk wasn’t worth the reward.

What I really like about this little anecdote are the multiple interactions.  Because we chose to burn one portion of the prairie but not the others, the cattle made the decision to focus their grazing on the recently burned portion to take advantage of the high forage quality of that grass.  Our choice to use a light stocking rate meant that the cattle had more than enough to eat, even within the burned patch, and could eat almost exclusively big bluestem and indiangrass (their favorites) and didn’t have to eat prairie clovers or other wildflowers.  The uneven grazing pressure between burned and unburned patches led to two different types of habitat structure – dense cover in the unburned patch and sparse cover in the burned.  That variety in habitat influenced the feeding behavior of the mice, which, in turn, influenced the seed survival of prairie clover (and probably other wildflower species).

I’m speculating a little now, but based on other observations – and a little data – I think there’s one more ripple from this whole interaction.  The prairie clover plants in the burned area were able to produce ripe seeds, but when those seeds dropped they also fell to the ground where there was abundant bare ground, (because of the burn) and where the nearby dominant grass plants were severely weakened by season-long grazing.  That set of circumstances, assuming some well-timed rains, provides just about the best possible conditions for the germination and survival of new prairie clover seedlings the following year.  In fact, I’ve paid close attention to prairie clover seedlings since I first noticed this whole fire/grazing/mice/seeds scenario, and I definitely find many more prairie clover seedlings each summer in the portions of the prairie that were burned/grazed the previous year than in unburned or more recently burned portions.

I think one important lesson from all of this has to do with the importance of providing a variety of habitat and growing conditions (habitat heterogeneity) across grasslands each year.  When multiple options are available, species can make “choices” in the way they interact with the landscape.  Grazers choose to graze in recently burned patches, mice choose to feed where there is protective cover.  Prairie clover seedlings don’t make choices, per se, but they are definitely able to germinate under some conditions more than others.  And because the choices of some species (including us) influence those of others, heterogeneity begets more heterogeneity.

Although it’s a difficult thing to study, my guess is that variability in habitat across a prairie is important for the long-term survival of many species.  Mobile species can move around the prairie to find the best possible habitat each year.  Less-mobile species, like plants, might experience tough growing conditions in a particular season, but those conditions will change the next year.  The result is a dynamic, shifting, mosaic of habitat and species interactions across the prairie.  That sounds like a functioning ecosystem to me!