While prepping photos and text for Words4It, I discover a lot. It’s a loose process. Today, I searched for something green (to avoid monotonous pictures of snow) and located this early July shot of milkweed in full flower. I found a surprise along the right edge when I opened it in Photoshop: a bumble bee is banking a turn to land on a flower! [Sidenote: Tiny bee / big flower. It's like a human finding a 50-foot tall hot fudge sundae.] I wasn’t aware of the bee when I took the picture. The larger image (330k) shows more detail including another tiny critter I’ll let you find for yourself. Zoom in to see it.
Then I tackle the text. I remembered reading an Edward Albee play decades ago where a child was referred to as a “bumble of joy.” Google to the rescue! I discovered this short article about the derivation of the word, “bumble,” and Albee’s use of it in The American Dream.
The city lets milkweed grow near the millpond. It’s the prime food source for monarch butterflies that migrate from Mexico to Michigan each summer. How do they make this round trip spanning 3-4 generations of butterflies? If you check milkweed plants, you might find a monarch caterpillar feasting or a chrysalis hanging on the undersides of leaves.
[...] may often be beautiful, but its beauty masks a savage world. By mid-summer, I start to explore milkweed plants to see if the caterpillars of monarch butterflies are feasting on them. I arrived a few [...]