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.
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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.
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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?
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