First bee of the season

[randy_byers]

The raspberries have just started to blossom, and I saw my first bee of the year. I still don't know what kind they are. This one was pretty much as I remembered the bees that have shown up the past couple of years since the local wild honey bees apparently died off. It was a little bit bigger than a honey bee, quite hairy, with bands or areas of black and a pale, buttery yellow. It may be a mason bee, but it's not the Orchard Mason Bee, which seems to be all black with a metallic green or blue sheen, from the pictures I've seen. Is this some kind of bumblebee instead? I guess I did see a bumblebee earlier this year -- not in my garden -- that was what I think of as the traditional kind, with lots of black and a few bands of bright yellow.

This hornfaced bee is close in coloration and hairiness to the bee I saw in the raspberries. I guess the hornfaced bee is another type of mason bee, so maybe that's it. I'll have to look for the horns next time.

Hm, just stumbled upon this page about the type of garden plants that attract mason bees. Raspberries are on the list. "There are about 3,500 species of native bees in the USA," it says. Good luck identifying the species in your garden, it might as well say.

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[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

One of the things I've always liked about gardening is how much face-time it gives me with bugs, particularly when I'm weeding. I'll be pulling a mess of weeds and watching ladybugs having sex or eating aphids, and think, yeah, this is the life, this is so great. And it is so great, really, it is, but it's a little difficult to explain precisely why it's so great to see bugs going about their normal bugly lives under one's very eyes. Some of it is that they're so small, and some of it is that they're so non-mammalian, and some of it is that they're so aesthetically pleasing, particularly the afore-mentioned ladybugs, the wasps (but not the yellowjackets), the bees, the ground beetles, and those small bright green or bronze beetles that shine as if they're made of metal.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

A week or two ago I was digging up the end of an old bed and unburied a chrysalis that was oxblood colored. The details in the casing were delicate and precise, and the whole thing looked like a carved gem, perhaps a garnet. It looked abstract -- a totem or symbol. I reburied it, not knowing what creature would eventually emerge.