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 […]

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 […]

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.

But…that’s a Wool Carder

The Wool Carder is a little bee with an outsize dose of possessiveness. Almost every afternoon, I see one patrolling the snapdragons as if making sure no other bees try to get in. Then it climbs in for a snack and zooms away. They’re called Wool Carders because the female take the fuzz off fuzzy […]

Return of the Wool Carder bee

Another bee that I’ve been looking for has turned up: the Wool Carder bee. They’re called Wool Carders because the females gather the fuzz from hairy leaves to line their nests. Like the honeybee, they’re not natives, but an introduced bee from Europe. Unlike the honeybee, they tend to stick to Old World flowers. Mine […]

Snapdragons

The snapdragons have been flowering for about a month now. I’ve been leaning in to get a whiff of their bubblegum / tutti frutti scent from time to time. And then I saw the weirdest bee. This was right after Readercon, so finding out what it was sort of got lost in the shuffle. And […]