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Pollinator gardening
Dec. 25th, 2018 06:57 pmWhen I started gardening, I had these ambitions that I was going to, I don't fucking know, grow my own food or something. Which is an admirable goal, yes, but my yard is composed of sand and bullshit. Apart from almost drowning myself in cherry tomatoes, annoying everyone I knew with free jalapenos, and spending a lot of time fighting with aphids and the ants who turned them into a problem (yes, I know: coffee grounds), I didn't accomplish much.
It turns out that flower gardening with an eye on helping out bees and butterflies is a lower-stress proposition, so that's mostly what I shifted into. The thing that you have to understand about bees, though, is that honeybees have a specific register they buzz in when they're pissed off about something. What do honeybees get pissed about? Lots of things, it turns out.
They landed on you, and you went inside. They wanted to hang out on a bag all day because it has a picture of a flower on it, and you need to throw the bag away before it gets blown all over your neighbor's yard. They found a flower they liked, and then another bee came and tried to fit in the flower with them. Just, you know, bee problems.
But a lot of the angry buzzing seemed to come for no real reason at all. Just walk past a plant, hear angry buzzing, be vaguely miffed because the bee in question wouldn't have a flower to get territorial over if you hadn't planted it in the first place.
Turns out these little jerks just fly around making the same buzz as an angry honeybee. They're not mad about anything, that's just how they sound. So, mystery solved. My flowers haven't been visited by particularly irritable honeybees, they're being made use of by native sweat bees with resting bitch buzz.
It turns out that flower gardening with an eye on helping out bees and butterflies is a lower-stress proposition, so that's mostly what I shifted into. The thing that you have to understand about bees, though, is that honeybees have a specific register they buzz in when they're pissed off about something. What do honeybees get pissed about? Lots of things, it turns out.
They landed on you, and you went inside. They wanted to hang out on a bag all day because it has a picture of a flower on it, and you need to throw the bag away before it gets blown all over your neighbor's yard. They found a flower they liked, and then another bee came and tried to fit in the flower with them. Just, you know, bee problems.
But a lot of the angry buzzing seemed to come for no real reason at all. Just walk past a plant, hear angry buzzing, be vaguely miffed because the bee in question wouldn't have a flower to get territorial over if you hadn't planted it in the first place.
Turns out these little jerks just fly around making the same buzz as an angry honeybee. They're not mad about anything, that's just how they sound. So, mystery solved. My flowers haven't been visited by particularly irritable honeybees, they're being made use of by native sweat bees with resting bitch buzz.
