Sunday, June 24, 2007

Gaillardia and Green Bee ....

This was a somewhat eventful weekend just past in our garden ... starting Thursday night (perfectly timed with getting off work) we had a few rather dramatic thunderstorms blow through, with strong wind gusts, torrential rains and even a bit of hail. Another bigger one came through at about the same time Friday, and though there was some significant tree and wind damage around town and in the county (there were even a couple of funnels in the counties just to the north and south of us) most of Casa y jardín IVG was spared any serious damage. Consequently, it's been cool and somewhat muggy the past two days ... too muddy to do much other than pull a few weeds and hope for a bit of sun to take some pictures of the current bloomers. Yesterday was totally gray and dispiriting, and today was little better, but we did go out late afternoon when there was a wee bit of sun and took the camera on a tour of the garden ... tonight's shot is just a really good one Fernymoss got of one of the green bees currently visiting the Blanket Flowers. I had been trying to catch one of these little guys myself at another plant and between the two of us we managed to get a few good shots of bee butts and this exceptionally good one where you can see the entire bee, rather than just the pollen laden posterior.

Later, while having some sandwiches on the porch, we were graced by a hummingbird who spent quite a bit of time feeding on the proliferous Bee Balm blooms still blazing away
out in the front bed. Alas, my mere Fuji Finepix isn't fast enough to catch these fleeting visits ... so you'll have to content yourselves with a green bee for tonight!

5 comments:

olivia said...

Sitting on the porch eating sandwiches, watching the hummingbirds in the bee balm ... sounds lovely IVG!

olivia said...

Oh, and excellent capture of the green bee Fernymoss! On large view, you can see his legs just thick w/ pollen!

Larry Kollar said...

That's a bee?

That *does* sound like a nice kind of day, a little porch picnic & bird watching.

Iowa Victory Gardener said...

We do love our screened in porch Olivia and FAR... when it's not too hot we like to have dinner out there and survey the front bed for just such visitors. Last fall we had a pair of Goldfinches who came by every night to feast on the coneflower blooms and that was always an exciting event, given they're our state bird and you don't see them that often in the city....

Iowa Victory Gardener said...

Well duh, the goldfinches didn't eat the blooms! They were after the seeds, LOL. Someone needs to start getting to bed earlier!