Want to learn more about native gardening, how to best support pollinators, and even certify your own garden to show off to your neighbors? ICT Bee Fest has you covered! Join us on Sept 27th in Wichita, KS for monarch tagging, native plant vendors, local art, and so much more! Read on:

The editor for the Tallgrass Prairie Reader is John T. Price. uipress.uiowa.edu/books/tallgr...

When it's too hot to go out, try taking a literary trip. Experience wonder through others.

Public Domain:

*William A Quayle "The prairie and the sea" www.biodiversitylibrary.org/creator/3115...

*Margaret Fuller "Summer on the Lakes in 1843" Chicago prairie begins p25 tile.loc.gov/storage-serv...

Wildflowers captivate. For many like Fuller, the flowers made them pause, consider the prairie, and fall in love with it.

"O, this square mile of prairie is an intoxicant to the soul!" wrote William A. Quayle about his KS prairie.

Fall's eruption of plains wildflowers is here, asking us to pause.

Its previous owner underlined in the introduction, "Even as a literary landscape, the tallgrass is endangered."

This being the result of the American imagination's fixation on forests, mountains, and other Thoreau-ish places of wild beauty—

"—or at least a more mainstream notion of that beauty."

Way more bee species were visiting that day, but I'll stop myself here. Thanks for checking out the bees, and as a bonus, here's a little guy I haven't identified. Anybody know who she is???

Finally, a good old-fashioned bumble bee. Brown-belted Bumble Bee, based on the Great Plains Bumble Bee Atlas, because that second abdominal thorax is crescent-shaped with a rusty swoop. FULL pollen baskets on that fella's legs. What a cutie.

TINY BEE ROUND: "tiny dark bee" and "green sweat bee" groups. That tiny little bee is ZOOMing, and she's probably a small carpenter bee. Then there's the itty bitty green, metallic sweat bee just doused in poppy mallow pollen. The purple poppy mallow neighbors the bee balm, and I had to include it.

This bee's long antennae caught my eye. They're thick and long, curling over its head. And that glassy eyeball! He's a member of the "Chap Leg Bees" group, probably a Long-horned bee (Melissodes) of some sort.