Vermont Pollinator Photography

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Vermont Pollinator Photography

Pollinator portraits from one small Vermont yard. Real behavior, tiny dramas, pollinator nerds welcome.

All images are taken in our 1/3-acre backyard on the deep sandy soils of the Winooski River delta—prime habitat for ground-nesting species.

02/14/2026

I’ve got many more to share - follow along to see more…

02/08/2026

Goldenrod and Aster

I grew and planted a lot of goldenrod and aster last season, intentionally planting it so the plants would be side by side in many places in hopes that I could get shots where the bees on one flower would have the background of the other. These are a few of my favorites.

“That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other?”

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

02/05/2026

Male striped sweat bee (Agapostemon Sp.)

02/02/2026

The first image is a furrow bee (Halictidae) caught by a flower crab spider (Thomisidae), the classic sit-and-wait predator on blooms.

The second image is a small carpenter bee (Ceratina) that got grabbed as I was watching, but was able to quickly escape. It was never pierced by the fangs, and so I assume it survived the encounter. That puncture is how the spider delivers venom and digestive enzymes to immobilize prey and start digestion. Those enzymes liquefy internal tissues into a nutrient soup. The spider then uses a muscular pump in its mouthparts to suck the liquid back out through the same wound.

Flower crab spiders don’t build capture webs. They hunt with camouflage and lightning-fast front legs, grabbing whatever lands. Flies are common prey, but bees are on the menu too. Some species can even slowly shift color over days to better match the flower they’re using as a hunting platform.

Predation like this is a natural part of our ecosystems, a reminder that “pollinator habitat” is actually a full food web, with predators helping maintain balance and diversity among the insect crowd.

01/31/2026

A carrot wasp in the genus Gasteruption, photographed on raspberry bloom.

Adults fuel up on nectar, so they show up on flowers like this. But females carry that long ovipositor for a different job: threading it into concealed brood chambers of solitary bees and wasps, often in hollow stems or wood, to lay an egg. The larva develops by taking over that carefully stocked nursery, feeding on the provisions and sometimes the developing host.

One more quiet mechanism that shapes insect communities.

01/29/2026

Alfalfa leafcutter bee (Megachile rotundata), female, on clover.

This small leafcutter bee was introduced to the US for alfalfa seed production and is still used commercially today. It’s widespread in Vermont, and you can find it in gardens, parks, and other urban or semi-disturbed places wherever there are flowers and nesting cavities.

She packs pollen on the brush of hairs under her abdomen, then heads off to cut neat leaf pieces and build a row of tiny brood cells in a hollow stem or other small cavity. She leaves one pollen loaf and one egg per cell, sealed up like leaf-wrapped rooms.

01/27/2026

Never-before-documented cuckoo wasp behavior (for this genus): captured frame by frame.

This sequence captures a Muesebeckidium cuckoo wasp hunting, grappling, and ovipositing into a live true bug nymph. As far as the published record goes, Muesebeckidium’s host has been unknown, and this “egg into a living insect” behavior has not been documented for the genus.

What you’re watching is a wasp using her ovipositor to place an egg into a living insect. That matters because cuckoo wasps are not provisioning moms, they are brood parasites. The egg is hidden inside the nymph so that, later, a different wasp can capture that same nymph as prey and carry it into a brood cell, like a trojan horse. Once inside the cell, the cuckoo wasp larva can develop by consuming the host’s provisions and likely the developing host offspring. This is a way around nest defenses that works because the egg is delivered by another wasp.

This is particularly impressive because most documented “egg-in-prey” style cuckoo-wasp strategies involve much smaller, easier targets. This nymph isn’t passive, it actively struggles, and the wasp has to manage the physics of a larger target. In the sequence you can see control being built. In the first frame, a critical hold has slipped. She re-establishes stability with a three-on-one grip before completing the insertion. It’s not just a quick grab and go, it’s a dynamic, problem-solving wrestle where leg placement and leverage are everything. A cuckoo wasp specialist confirmed the genus (Muesebeckidium) and flagged the modified tarsi as host-gripping structures. So this isn’t just dramatic footage, it’s the function of the morphology, caught in action.

01/26/2026

Truly tiny — wasps come in a tremendous diversity of shapes and sizes, and this one falls firmly into the truly tiny category. Pictured on goldenrod, you can see the scale by comparing it to a single goldenrod floret.

This is a Eucoilinae wasp (a subfamily within the figitid wasps) — parasitoids that develop inside other insects, especially flies. In plain English: they’re part of the quiet machinery that keeps insect populations from exploding. Most of us walk past a goldenrod patch and never notice the micro-predators feeding and pollinating alongside the bees. But these tiny wasps are critical, helping to keep decomposers, herbivores, and disease vectors in balance.

01/24/2026

Male broad-handed leafcutter bee (Megachile latimanus) on aster.

One of the more charismatic characters in the yard, and that huge, pale-haired “mitt” isn’t just for show. It’s a modified foreleg the male uses during courtship: he can fan scent, and during mating he may even cover the female’s eyes with those fuzzy front legs.

Leafcutter bees are solitary cavity nesters. The females cut neat circles from leaves (and sometimes petals) to build cigar-shaped brood cells, and they carry pollen on the belly (a fuzzy “scopa”), not on their legs.

01/22/2026

I believe this may be the very rare brown-winged striped sweat bee (Agapostemon splendens), rather than the more common silky striped sweat bee (Agapostemon sericeus), mainly because of the third shot, which shows the thorax texture. The wings also look a bit smokier/browner to me, though I have a really hard time noticing that difference even in reference photos. If you know this group, I’d love your take, as my identification skills are pretty rudimentary.

If this ID is right, it’s a fun one for our yard: A. splendens is considered rare in Vermont and is associated with deep, sandy soils. Our home sits on the Winooski River delta sandplain, and a lot of what shows up here seems to track that substrate. Like many Agapostemon, she’s a ground nester — built for our sun-warmed, well-drained soils.

01/20/2026

Takeoff. Male two-spotted bumble bee (Bombus bimaculatus) launching from anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum).

That “tongue” you’re seeing isn’t a needle—it’s a flexible nectar-sipping proboscis. Bumble bees mostly lap nectar rather than “sip” through a rigid straw, and they can fold that whole apparatus away when they fly.

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