beehammer

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.

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.