Bees high and low

So the bees flying around the top of the butterfly bush aren’t miner bees after all. The miner bees are somewhere else.

Bees in the buttercups

As spring warms up, the buttercups open, in dense patches of bright yellow flowers. The flowers have bright, glossy petals that can look almost white. Even when they’re not flowering, their leaves have an interesting mottley spottleness. That’s how you know these particular buttercups are Ranunculus repens. It’s not native here, but I like the […]

Three bees

I still have nothing more to say about the flowers from yesterday. I want to talk about the bees, starting with the cuckoo bee up to its neck in dandelion. Like the birds, they lay their eggs in other bees nests so carefully dug and provisioned in the ground. I’ve seen them before, tiny reddish […]

Cinco de flores

Flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, What more is there to say?

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.