Nectar Selecter

What a difference a day makes! After yesterdays winters tale today moved straight into summer. Blue skies, warm sunshine, sunhat.

After a long snowy winter and a delayed and fragmented spring, the alpine flowers this year are weeks behind time. However, most of the usual suspects can still be found, often at lower altitude locations. This was the case in my search for two Saxifrages and their hybrid. Saxifraga biflora, pictured here and the much commoner and more widespread Saxifraga oppositifolia both grow in great quantities in the screes for 500m or so above where this picture was taken. However this year that area is still snowbound but I found a few plants of each at the very bottom of the screes. Both were being visited by ants in search of the sweet nectar in the base of the flowers. In the course of their search pollen travels between the plants and higher up many variable and beautiful hybrids occur.

I had an enjoyable hike down from Spielboden where the normally shy Marmots are so tame that they come up to visitors in search of food, down, across and up again to reach this spot. Hot work, in contrast to yesterdays multi-layered, woolly-hatted experience. Later I had tea (croissants & Swiss cheese) in the flowery meadows above Saas Fee. My perfect world :)

Backblips for my first two days in the Alps already posted. Two more to come soon.