white-lined sphinx ~ 04/15/14 ~ Pinnacles

white-lined sphinx nectaring on giraffe's head

Hyles lineata nectaring on Lamium amplexicaule 

Lamiaceae

Well, I won't win any photography awards for these photos, but it's good enough to show how impressively long its proboscis is and for an ID.  I've been casually calling these hummingbird moths.  Problem is no one knows what I'm talking about.  In my defense, I spotted what I believe was a Hyles lineata during a break in the rain at SFB Morse Botanical Reserve on February 28, which happened to be around the time when I also started seeing rufous hummingbirds on migration.  On an overcast day, the overall coloring for both the hefty moth and the tan bird are remarkably similar, and the name stuck in my head.  I have Paul to thank for correcting me when we saw another white-lined sphinx along the butterfly highway. 

Thanks to the blurring of memory through time, I had forgotten all about the clearwings (hey, if you don't use it, you lose it).  Back when I lived in OH, I was familiar with the hummingbird clearwing (Hemaris thysbe), which can have the more traditional green and red coloring of hummingbirds.  They were popular subjects of insect question calls to the museum and were frequently described as hovering like a hummingbird with a lobster tail.  Pinnacles has a different clearwing, the bumble bee moth (Hemaris thetis), formerly classified under the eastern snowberry clearwing sphinx (Hemaris diffinis).  I plan on keeping my eye out for them, because day-flying sphinx moths are fun to watch.

giraffe's head ~ 03/26/14 ~ Ahwahnee Hills

giraffe's head / henbit deadnettle

Lamium amplexicaule

Lamiaceae

Like with owl's-clovers, it doesn't take a big stretch of the imagination to see why the CA locals call this giraffe's head.  They're often featured as a plant in bloom at the Garland Ranch visitor's center, yet after years of looking, I've never seen it growing there myself.  So, I was a little surprised to find out this is not a native plant.  It hails from Europe, Asia, and Africa, if Wikipedia is correct.  For some reason the flowers remind me of CA hedgenettle, even though the leaves are totally different.

CA hedgenettle ~ 05/13/10 ~ Elkhorn Slough

orange-rumped bumble bee on California hedgenettle
Bombus melanopygus on Stachys bullata
Lamiaceae

So, where's the orange rump? According to an old post from Seattle, WA, only females have the orange band??? I thought this bumble bee would be easy to identify to species. Nope. After pulling my hair out the other morning over paintbrushes and owl's clovers IDs, I was ready to simply call this a Bombus sp. and call it a day. This is definitely not one of the two most commonly mentioned CA species, the yellow-faced bumble bee (B. vosnesenskii) nor the Sonoran bumble bee (B. sonorus). Thanks to a lovely photo ID site from UC Irvine (also linked in common names here), I'm fairly confident of this ID even though I read somewhere there are 27 described species of bumble bees in CA (and probably several more undescribed).

As evidence of why I prefer photos of the living, versus collection specimens, check out this Discover Life site of pinned B. melanopygus. I dare any lay person to look at those pinned bees and think, oh yeah, that's what I saw. With the explosion of macro photography and institutions wanting to share their resources online, I predict we'll be seeing better and better ID sites in the near future. Often one photograph is not enough; it's preferable to have a whole collection of photographs. Sometimes this can be a burden, especially when those photo collections are not always reviewed for accurate identification. However, I'm still glad to see this trend.

I'm fairly confident of the plant ID, too. The other possibility is rigid hedgenettle (Stachys ajugoides ssp. ajugoides), but it just didn't have the right face to me.

There's also another insect next to the bumble bee. I can't tell from my pictures if it's a plant bug or a beetle. My pictures are still much improved from last year.