Lake Springfield Boathouse – July 2025
/The garden around the Lake Springfield Boathouse is maintained by Springfield Plateau Chapter of the Missouri Master Naturalists. I’m not part of that team but I do enjoy their results. My husband was looking for a place to practice a technique for photographing bees and the first place I looked was a good starting location for him: the buttonbush near the front door of the building! I took a few pictures before he even got his gear unloaded!
While he tried out his new technique, I photographed the other plantings. The second place I hoped to find insects/bees was the cup plant, but it wasn’t blooming yet. It did have buds…so should be a great place to check later in the season.
We headed past the purple martin houses (which were very busy) to the meadow area. The milkweed was blooming but the flowers looked less colorful than I expected, and they were not attracting large number of insects either. The bee balm was more attractive to bees than the milkweed. There was a spiderweb that looked a little like a hammock in some dried stems from last season; it was highlighted by the heavy dew. I took some backlit images of 2 plants that were not blooming but had interesting shapes.
One of the pictures I took of an insect on a milkweed leaf had a surprise when I looked at it on my big monitor at home: a tiny egg (maybe a Monarch egg)!
Across the walking trail there are brambles and trees. The locust was full of still-green pods and vetch was blooming in the undergrowth.
It was a productive morning activity. My husband thought maybe it was not warm enough for peak insect sightings; he might have been right but, with the humidity, it was the best time for us to be there!
