Will the mystery plant remain unsolved?

I’m beginning to think we’ll never know what the mystery plants are. The grey weather has descended. Some of the leaves are showing a dusty white rust of doom. But still the various mystery flowers open a bright yellow. Still they are foolish enough to keep setting fruits. And at least one green Agapostemon bee […]

Cool weather revives hostas too

Usually the hostas flower in June and that’s it. But now with the cool weather, a clump of hostas up on the hill are flowering again. They even have bumblebees in them, getting pollen pasted on their butts. It’s nice to see them flower again, but it feels like another sign of weird weather this […]

A day of good bee hunting

I enjoyed hosting today on the Life-Friendly Garden Tour. Nice people stopped by and let me show off my bees. If you’re interested at all in bees, you know about honeybees going missing. If you want to help honeybees, the best way is to keep a hive. It’s not hard, so they say, and it […]

Come see my bees

Every year in Watertown, we have a Life-Friendly Garden Tour, in which gardeners who don’t use chemicals in their yards open their gardens for you to see. This year, I finally signed up to be a part of it. After all, not using chemicals is pretty important if you want to give the bees a […]

I got nothing but a green bee

Never mind the rain, here’s a green bee, Clad from head to tail in a green sheen. And here’s where I give up on Finding a rhyme for Agapostemon.

What’s behind those leaves?

Bees! When you look at this wall of grape leaves imagine you hear buzzing.

The usual suspects are in the goldenrod

August started early in the goldenrod. They’ve been flowering for a couple weeks and bees love it. I’ll try to catch more pics of the little bees later. For now, here’s a bumblebee, a honeybee, and a mystery wasp.

Getting lucky with Woolcarder bees

The Woolcarder bees still like the snapdragons, but they seem to love a big clump of catnip nearby. Sometimes I see at least four or five at once, too fast and too many to subitize. I love watching the males hovering and darting here and there, making sure there’s plenty of sweet nectar for the […]

More coneflowers, more bees

More coneflowers have answered the first coneflower‘s call. This is one of the great bee flowers. My trinity of bees — honeybees, bumblebees, and Agapostemon — visit them, methodically going through the spikes of pollen in the centers. When the Halictus bees are done with the sunflowers, they’ll come to the coneflowers too. Together they […]

A buffet for bees in the catmint

The mound of catmint, Nepeta “Walker’s Low“, has bloomed all May and June, attracting an amazing array of bees.