Tassel Hyacinth

This crab spider does not make a web, but sits in wait for its prey on a flower. When an insect visits, in search of nectar, it is jumped upon and killed. Here she (yes, it is a she, males are much smaller) choose a Tassel Hyacinth (Muscari comosum).

The Tassel Hyacinth is now in flower on roadsides and in meadows. It is a bulbous plant, like the hyacinths that grow in gardens. On the picture below you can see it has two kinds of flowers. Below are the purplish-brownish fertile flowers. The top of the plant is attractive to insects (and spiders) due to the strong blue color of the infertile flowers.

Unfurling

In most vascular plants the young leaves are folded or they form a cylinder that unrolls. Ferns are different, their fronds are uncurling spirals. Now is the time to look for them. The following two should be easy to find.


The Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium) grows on steep and stony slopes in the shadow of trees.
















And the Common Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) covers the forest floor under oaks and chestnuts.

Two Bee Orchids

Here are the smallest orchids to be found around Trémolat, only a few centimetres high. Take care where you are walking! They grow both in dry places with sparse and short vegetation. In a clearance in a open oak wood, but also in the kind of field which does not look beautiful at all and where people burn their rubbish or exercise their motor bike.

Both are from the genus of bee orchids, so called because the flowers look like bees sitting on a flower. At least, male bees from some species think the resemblance striking; they try to copulate with the flowers and thus take the pollen from one flower to the other.



The first one is the Yellow Bee Orchid (Ophrys lutea).


















And here you see the Dark Bee Orchid (Ophrys sulcata).

Those mediterranean species have their northern limit in this part of France. Maybe because they can’t stand a colder climate, maybe because their pollinators can only survive in milder weather.