Butter-and-Eggs
I was down at the transfer station[1] dropping off a couple of weeks worth of garbage on September 11, 2021, and happened to notice that the patch of lawn next to the building was full of rather attractive little yellow flowers.
I only had my phone camera with me at the time, so I picked a sprig of the blossoms to bring home for better pictures.
The flowers had a long tail coming off the base, which is typically a nectary to draw pollinating insects way down inside the flower.
The blossoms resemble snapdragons, with a closed lip making a lid enclosing the actual business end of the blossom:
Pressing down on the orange part with my thumb opened up the lid, exposing the stamens, pistils, and anthers down inside.
Like snapdragons, these appear to be specifically trying to attract large, strong pollinators like bumblebees. These are strong enough to force the lid open, and then once inside have a long enough tongue to reach the nectar while picking up and/or depositing pollen inside the flower. It is to the flower’s advantage to try to appeal to only one type of pollinator, because if the only thing pollinating them is a particular species of bee, it is much more likely to go between flowers of the same species and so actually carry the correct type of pollen. If a pollinator is going to a bunch of different kinds of flowers, then there are good odds it will not have the right kind of pollen for whatever flower it is going into at the time.
Anyway, these are pretty distinctive flowers, and I feel pretty safe in saying that they are Butter-and-Eggs, Linaria vulgaris (also known as Yellow Toadflax). They are unfortunately an invasive species from Europe, although it is not quite clear to me when or how they came over (escaped decorative plants, or tiny seeds carried by accident?). Anyway, they now pretty much associate with human activity, tending to grow in disturbed ground. While they are in the same family as snapdragons, they are not any more closely related than that.
And, as I posted back in 2017[2], we also have the rather showy caterpillar that the Canadians imported to control it, the Toadflax Brocade Caterpillar:
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[1] We don’t have trash pickup here outside of town, but in an astonishingly convenient turn of events, the county transfer station is just down the road from our house. It is close enough that sometimes I just throw the trash bag into a wheelbarrow and push it there by hand rather than using the car. The transfer station is essentially a giant trash-masher that stuffs the garbage into a big semi-trailer, and when it is full it is hauled off to the actual landfill down by Mass City (a 45 minute drive). The transfer station is fairly new, and pretty well kept-up. Hence the lawn with flowers.
[2] Interestingly, I got the pictures of the caterpillar that eats Butter-and-Eggs while I was eating lunch on the county courthouse lawn (during the lunch break for the trial where I was serving on the jury). And then I found the actual Butter-and-Eggs at the county transfer station, which was also a county-owned lawn. It almost makes this plant, and the caterpillar that eats it, look like county employees or something.
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I love butter-and-eggs and even though I know it is non-native, I never heard of efforts to get rid of it before your informative message! Why not birds-foot trefoil which is also invasive and much more abundant, at least in Ohio?
Yes, sometimes I wonder about which invasive species are actually a problem. Particularly around here, where the plants and insects are still recolonizing the area after the last ice age, and depending on how you look at it, we have essentially no native species and everything is invasive to some degree.
Compared to a lot of the alternatives, butter-and-eggs seems fairly innocuous. The ones I found seem to be more or less coexisting with grass, not pushing it out.
It is to the flower’s advantage to try to appeal to only one type of pollinator, because if the only thing pollinating them is a particular species of bee, it is much more likely to go between flowers of the same species and so actually carry the correct type of pollen.
That’s a great tidbit of information. I hadn’t known that before. Thanks!
That’s one of the things I learned from keeping bees. It turns out that one of the reasons why honeybees are in such demand as pollinators, is that a hive will concentrate on a single species of flower at any given time. This happens because they communicate with each other to tell one another about good foraging sites. Solitary bees are a lot more catch-as-catch-can, and are as likely to go between flowers of different species as not.