High above the Indus river valley, the Hemis monastery sits at an altitude of about 3500 meters above mean sea level. Cut off from moist winds both to the north and the south, this is one of the lowest of the high deserts of the world. But at this time, in late summer, verging on autumn, the last of the summer flowers can be seen. My first definite sighting of Blue globe thistles (Echinops cornigerus) came as our car left the highway and worked its way up to the parking lot of the monastery. This is close to the upper end of the range of this plant (although I suspect that ranges are becoming more fluid as the climate becomes more variable), and no other confounding globe thistle grows at this height. It had just rained, perhaps a couple of millimeters, a significant percent of the rain that the plateau gets. This is the season when the Blue globe thistle blooms.
On the verge of autumn, bees were hard at work. The four in the lower photo are definitely carpenter bees of the species Xylocopa pubescens. They have a very interesting social organization, different from honeybee hives, but I’ll leave that story for another day. The single bee in the featured photo is different. I’m afraid I cannot identify it yet, but I wonder whether it is a polyester bee (genus Colletes). Any help in identifying it would be appreciated. For a desert, Ladakh has a surprisingly rich ecology.