White heath aster

White heath aster, Aster pilosus, is now in full bloom. Each plant stands about four feet tall and has hundreds of small blooms. The plant grows from a perennial root.

Honeybees adore this species. Most other flowers have gone to seed or died back completely, so the abundant nectar and pollen draws dozens of bees to each cluster of flowers.

Pollen basket, the "corbicula", of a honeybee, packed full of aster pollen. The basket consists of a flattened area on the hind leg surrounded by long stiff hairs. The pollen will be used to feed young bees in the hive.

2 thoughts on “White heath aster

  1. Pingback: Late migrant: orange-crowned warbler | Ramble

  2. Anonymous

    The previous owner of the property where we now lived had wildflowers around the house. Some of them have survived and this is one of them. They are ‘interplanted’ with lily of the valley, and along a fence under a dogwood tree. However, they look like tall NOTHINGS all summer, and when this time of year rolls around, I always regret the ones I have pulled out, since the bloom is try a marvel, up close, and our pollinators need all the help they can get! Have you figured out how to use these successfully in a combination planting so they don’t look like tall lanky weeds all summer? They look like Russian Tarragon plants until they finally bloom. Maybe if they were interplanted with a similarly tall plant that bloomed during the summer, they wouldn’t be so conspicuous.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s