ParksidePollinators

About

  • What’s it Like to Be a Bee?

    What’s it Like to Be a Bee?

    The pollinators flit amongst a botanical smorgasbord yet all I see are inverse Jack-and-the-Bean-Stalk metaphors: in the real world the giants are us. *We* are the megafauna. The flowers are skyscrapers serving all day buffet, so if you’re a pollinator, do you diversify or stick to ready staples, same thing everyday?

    I’m the type of person who likes to change up their diet over time, with some seasonal variety sprinkled in as needed, and so while I watch the native bees hyper fixate on the Russian Sage for months in a row I wonder what drives them to return to the same meal. Taste, accessibility, pollen-count-per-visit?

    If I were a native bee I wouldn’t stress about spiders, or garbage trucks, either, because you’d hope one would respect the stinger and the other is so big and lumbering in the driveway it is easy to avoid.  The biggest threat, however, is continuously countered by the bees who wear orange or yellow stripes across their furry backs, making it clear they should be considered off limits to birds.

    A photograph of a native bumblebee visiting a russian sage plant.
    Russian sage.

    ****

    This is a photograph of a small butterfly milkweed plant flowering.
    Butterfly milkweed.

    ****

    This is a photograph of butterfly milkweed surrounded by cowpen daisy.
    Butterfly milkweed and cowpen daisy.

    ****

    This is a photograph that shows two butterfly milkweed plants: one is flowering and the other isn't, with the second also surrounded by weeded cowpen daisy.
    Butterfly milkweed and weeded cowpen daisy.

    ****
    Cow Pen Daisy, native to Texas and parts southwest, are self-seeding, and notably allopathic, meaning it produces chemicals that suppress other plants to various degrees.

    Lucky for me I weeded it in early August and the milkweed rebounded nicely.

    Lucky, indeed, because I didn’t even know until recently what caused the problem. I thought it was because the cowpens were blocking the sun, or sprinkler, or taking too much water from their roots. But now I know better, thanks to the research I did for this post. We still have it on the property, it’s a great pollinator, too, but now try to make sure it only suppresses plants we don’t want.

    ****

    A photograph of a bee native to colorado visiting an apache plume plant.
    Apache Plume.

    Of the top three plants favored  by pollinators on the property, native bees consider the transplanted Russian Sage to be top tier, second only to the native Apache Plume. A sentiment of controversial popularity as their are other insects that think for both plants the flowers are too small, too big, the pollen tastes somehow wrong, or the terrain is dangerously spaced, or, even otherwise inaccessible.

    Think about being a butterfly and get wingsuit base jumping as your superpower. Skimming these towers of flowers, avoiding spiders and those monstrously larger garbage trucks. Would you ever want to go anywhere other than your happy place?

     ****

    This is a photograph of cosmos backlit against a green field with ponderosa pine shading the grass.
    Cosmos.

    ****

    A photograph of a bee native to Colorado visiting a flower on a russian sage plant.
    Russian sage and Virginia creeper.

     

  • How I Almost Lost my Job Planting Butterfly Milkweed

    How I Almost Lost my Job Planting Butterfly Milkweed

    The Milkweed was planted late, artificially cold-straited, and hand planted into ground wet from lawn sprinkler overspray where the high altitude sun only cooked the soil a little bit.

    Here was the balancing act. Once the seedlings germinated we needed strong light but they wouldn’t germinate if the soil dried out at all.

    I was skeptical. The butterfly milkweed seed’s need to have moist soil for almost 90 days uninterrupted, but the pressure was starting to build. If I didn’t succeed what happens to my relationship with the client? This is the second year they’ve bought organic milkweed seed, and it might be the soil or climate or me but nothing’s emerged. Nothing much, actually, from that first season except two lonely plants (Asclepias syriaca L.).

    Now the client tweaked the next purchase hoping we’d have better luck with a different species (Asclepias Tuberosa) but even if I don’t screw up the cold striation, the hot weather might sink the project. Then whose fault is that?

    The only thing to do is cheat, fess up, and buy mature plants to plant in May, as a guarantee something might flourish.

    When asked about it, I’d say it’s probably better to leave the seeds in the freezer for longer rather than let them thaw out, best to simulate a deeper winter than an early summer. Then when it’s time to plant, the seeds go from a freeze cycle to immediate planting in the wet ground. 

    The requirement that the soil remain moist for 60-90 days created some skepticism. We have to limit our watering and I wondered if the sprinklers would be up to the task. Hence the extra plants. I wonder if I’m operating on more luck then skill.

    I get asked this over coffee and surprised even myself with the answer. Sometimes you must take care of the garden, and other times you let the garden take care of itself.