Sunflowers are feeding bees

Presenting the big-ass sunflower that was just a tall weed that I hoped was a sunflower about a month ago. If you look close enough, you might see the bee on its face. And what’s the bee here for?

Weedercon

I love Readercon, but it’s still too many people, too many ideas, too much information in too little space. No wonder it doesn’t take long for me to go into buffer overflow. What? A writer who needs a little alone time? Never heard of such a thing. This year it was even hotter than usual […]

Virginia Creeper

Virginia creeper is one of those plants you have to keep an eye on and hack back when it goes too far. It grows so robustly because it’s a native plant, and also because it’s a native, the bees love it so much that you can hear the vines buzzing.

Still some honeybees here

It’s pretty sad that I can get excited about seeing more than one honeybee at a time, but there we are. No clue where their hive is. They seem to like climbing way deep into flowers, so lately I have lots of pictures of bee butts. Right now, the most popular flower is the tall […]

Shady Characters in the Garden

Stay cool.

So It’s July

I like to have at least as much fun as a honeybee with her head buried in a flower. So you can expect this month to be even more disorganized and distracted by the garden. You can definitely expect more pictures. More bees. More syrphid flies. More weeds. Maybe even some flowers.

Betty the Bee and Veronica

Finally, a plant that I actually put there on purpose is attracting bees. This bumblebee likes it so much, she’s going after the fallen bits.

Buzzapaloosa

I finally found the bees! In fact, it’s been Buzzapaloosa around here. The honeybees have been hiding in the bladder campion. Nice to see I was remembering correctly that it’s a popular flower with them. The bumblebees are a lot easier to spot, naturally.

Re:Bumblebee Economics

Honeybees get all the glamor but I like the fat, fuzzy, comical bumblebee. So naturally I enjoyed Bumblebee Economics, by Bernd Heinrich. The economics of the title refer to the energy economy of how bumblebees spend their energy to gather energy in the form of nectar and pollen. It’s a problem every organism has to […]

Tricky Bugs

I was so sure this was a syrphid fly, but bugGuide has set me straight: it’s a Narcissus Bulb Fly Merodon equestris. At least it’s in the syrphid family. And I do have actual syrphid flies, but they’re much smaller than Mr. Bumblebee Fakeout Merodon.