While I was out getting shots of the sunflower seeds, I discovered the reason for our sunflowers prematurely and quite suddenly dying out a few weeks back. The answer is in the photo below: aphids! For those of you that don't know, I have a brief biology lesson for you. Ants farm aphids. Certain species of ants will maintain "herds" of aphids to collect and eat the honeydew that the aphids release. As such, the ants will guard and defend the aphids from predators.
I did not realize we had an aphid herd on one of the sunflowers I was attempting to photograph until I peeved off the aphid herding ants. In a matter of seconds, I had ten to twenty angry ants crawling up my arm, convinced my mission in life was to destroy their precious stock. Once I'd managed to rid myself of my attackers, I took a closer look at the goings on of the sunflowers. Sure enough, I spotted ants obsessively tending some little green pods. However, I couldn't get near enough to the sites of interest without being attacked by ants. I did managed to get some photos of the ants, though several ants attacked my camera while I was at it.
Before today, I knew ants farmed aphids, but I couldn't get close enough to see that that's what the green pods were. Thank goodness for photos, which enlarged the activity enough for me to glean what the heck was going on.
For those of you that find this as interesting as I did, you can view a larger size of the below photo here. For everyone else--my apologies. Ants fascinate me as much as bees. You may resume life now.
Thanks for the lesson on ants and aphids! I never knew that either. How fascinating! Insect behavior is really interesting to observe. Amazing how they have been programmed to do so many strange things.
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