Why is it - Spring flowers come in all shades and tints. Fall flowers are predominantly yellow? Here on the Georgia piedmont I'll find goldenrod, camphor-weed, Confederate daisy on the granite outcrops, fields of sneezeweed. In south Texas I'd look for broom-weed, snakeweed, golden-eye asters.
Come along and let's take a look at the autumn insects that visit those flowers. I'm taking a white enameled pan. If you don't have one, bring a pie plate or something similar. Take a fistful of the yellow blooms and tap them into the pan, dislodging the critters. What do we see?
Ecology 101 - there are many more tiny insects than large ones.
Aphids, leafhoppers, little squirming thrips. And a crab spider or two. Yellow or white, they wait in the blossoms for unsuspecting flies.
A few larger insects. On goldenrod, some yellow and black soldier beetles. Maybe a locust borer --
Locust-borer larvae bore into the stems of locust trees (well, duh!). They kill the tree, releasing a slug of nitrogen into the soil. Other trees like tulip-poplars reap the benefits of that nitrogen.
The big black-and-yellow adult beetles congregate on goldenrod in the autumn. They eat the pollen. Do they gain anything from that? I suspect that it's more like a singles bar -- a place to meet dates.
I recall a Spring in South Texas when huisache borers laid low all of those multi-stem shrubs, right down to the ground. And there are mesquite borers. I don't know much about them.
Where do those borers go, for a good time?
Dac Crossley
September 13, 2012.
"Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control." - Cyril Connally