Found some pollinators in the chives

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day to go visit the Pollinator plot at the community garden. The chives have been flowering for some days, and I was looking forward to seeing the bees. Sure enough, the chives were hosting a bee party.

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 […]

Sunflower weather

Now that the heat has hit, I can barely keep up with the flowers. This sunflower bloomed a few days ago, and today already the flowerhead is busy making seeds. The bees have done their work. Traditional varieties of sunflowers are great bee flowers. They give so generously of their pollen, that bees get covered […]

Black-Eye Susan

The Black-Eye Susan that is not a sunflower is back. And the bees have found it. This is Halictus ligatus, another bee that I see fairly often, tiny bees bearing great saddlebags of pollen on their legs. Bugguide tells me he’s a male. If you look closely, you can see that he’s brushing his antennae. […]

The bees’ last summer dance party

Don’t tell the bees that summer is ending. They’re still crowding out the butterflies on the butterfly bush. The butterfly bush is where I first met the carpenter bees, and they’re still scaring me whenever I brush by. Yes, it may be hard to be believe but there are bees that scare me. That rattling […]

Bees of Spring

There’s a fairly bare, hard-packed stretch of dry soil that serves as a path up the hill in my yard, where I often see little brown bees zooming back and forth close to the ground. This year I finally slowed down enough to get some pictures. And I found a whole community of bees.

Coneflower

As I said earlier, the coneflowers have been a happening place for bees since the middle of July. Other flowers have been popular party places, but nothing seems to have attracted so many bees for so long as the coneflowers. There’s still lots of bees, but the flowers are getting a bit ratty looking, and […]

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?

The Hunt For Little Bees

I’ve always been endlessly fascinated by all the little bugs in my yard, flitting about on their mysterious bug business. Now that I can get close-up pictures of them I feel like a new window has opened upon their world. That’s how I discovered how wrong I was about which weed they would like. What […]