beehammer

So many different sorts of bee

2019-04-16T22:59:17Z

I went a bit overboard planting blanket flower back in December. It was cool and dry, and the plants weren't very big, and I had no real expectations of them bulking out as much as they did once things warmed back up.

Blanket flower is very pretty, and very showy, and I've wound up with a big fucking essentially contiguous stand of it in my front yard. This basically means that every bee and bee-adjacent bug in a half-mile radius cannot get enough of it. I was out watering at the correct time for bees this afternoon, and honey bees? Check. Solitary bees? Check. Solitary wasps? Check. Flies pretending to be bees? Check. It was just a buzzing mess of activity, and all the different sorts of bees had their own priorities.

The mustard greens have finally bolted, which means a sea of pretty little yellow flowers, which means tiny little wasps and butterflies visiting them.

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The rest of it

2018-12-26T16:49:50Z

I now have (almost) everything I need to make the yard fully operational. Most importantly, I am no longer beholden to the delivery guy's dodgy-ass schedule.

I also got extremely excited because the coralbean I planted about a year ago finally had flowers. Then I was like, "Wow, I had no idea coralbean had such... suspiciously sage-like flowers? I thought they were more like a honeysuckle shape?"

The coralbean is not finally flowering. The coralbean has a bit of red sage cropping up under it, some of which has punched through the canopy and that is now flowering. *jazz-hands*

One of the neighboring planters I kept a bunch of container-bound, older sage plants in is now full of reseeded babies, which will hopefully survive any further cold snaps. Since this is precisely why I kept the containers in that planter, mission accomplished.

So far tropical sage has demonstrated itself as a pretty reliable plant for my yard--it reseeds readily, keeps blooming even though I don't deadhead it, and the pollinators love it. The red, pink, and white varieties have been going pretty well, and I'm hoping the blue sage I picked up a few months ago now turns out to be a solid choice, too. I want to pick up some more mistflower, though--it's pretty, and the one that came free with my cocoplum has turned out to really be the bees' jam.

Now I just need to figure out how I'm going to get the fourth water barrel in without completely wrecking the croton that came with the house. It's not the greatest plant in the world, but it's put up with a lot of neglect and kept on ticking, so I feel like it deserves at least an attempt at preservation.

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Pollinator gardening

2018-12-26T00:15:58Z

When 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.

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Stingless bees

2018-12-09T21:08:20Z

Stingless bees, guys. Stingless bees! Don't get too excited, though. They can't really sting you, but they will bite the everloving shit out of you if you cross them.

They're kind of like a mid-grade bee. Their hive arrangement is way more chill than the typical honeybee, but they're like type-A control-freak rage-monsters compared to like a bumblebee or a solitary bee. Instead of the massive honeycombs and the worker bees flipping their shit thereon, stingless bees use the bumblebee/loose-hive plan of individual cell chambers and honeypots for brood-rearing and provisions.

Like their less-social, even-more-chill cousins, they produce honey, but they don't completely devote their lives to it. There are only a few species that have proven worthwhile when it comes to human exploitation. The rest of them are pretty much squarely in the "I got bitten a million times for this? Fuck my life." category*.

That doesn't mean they don't present an opportunity for casual collection, though. The stingless bees that are native to Latin America have been sort-of tamed for thousands of years, insofar as something that takes care of itself and generally doesn't bite you can be described as tame. The ones in Asia are more difficult to do more than just eat a little bit of honey out of, though they've also done a better job of keeping themselves alive.

*Killer bees also live in this category, but it's because they will kick the shit out of you at the least provocation, produce like 10% less honey than normal honey bees, and will abscond over absolutely minimal hive tampering. They're still productive, they're just huge dicks about everything.

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