Bumblebees Love Purple

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Why Do Bees Have a Favorite Color?

by Sandy Swegel

 

I visited one of my favorite suburban lawn alternative gardens yesterday.  It’s a true pollinator’s heaven of nectar and pollen, right on a neighborhood street. Full of perennial gaillardia and rudbeckia, and reseeding annual larkspur, cleome and sunflower, the garden uses about the same amount of water as your average lawn.

Bees were everywhere.  Neighbors stop by in wonder at what can be done with a front yard instead of plain old grass.  In the median strips in front of the flowers, kales and lettuces produced greens for the neighbors. This time of year, gaillardia and rudbeckia are dominant with their yellows, oranges and reds.  But something different this year was a plethora of purple larkspur.  Curious, I  asked community urban farmers Scott and Wendy about the variation.  They and the landowner are all careful gardeners, unlikely to throw in something different without a reason.  Scott explained matter-of-factly, “Well it’s for the bumblebees. They prefer purple.”  I was skeptical since I see bumblebees all day on different colored flowers.  He assured me they had watched the field the last couple of years. The bumblebees always went for the purple flowers.  And walking on the path, huge fat bumblebees were on the purple larkspur, gorging away.

 

I couldn’t resist a little more research and sure enough, studies in Germany showed that baby bumblebees love purple flowers. Purple flowers are thought to contain more nectar than other colors and that baby bumblebees who chose purple flowers had a better chance of survival…they then passed the purple preference onto their offspring.

I’m not sure what most piqued my curiosity this day…I loved learning that bumblebees like purple flowers best.  But I think I was more intrigued by Wendy and Scott just noticing all season that the bumblebees liked one particular color.  In the end, though, I’m most impressed with the bumblebees who somehow got the humans to plant their favorite food.  Very clever bees.

Photo credits:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/21/bees-can-sense-the-electric-fields-of-flowers/

 

Stalking the Wild Monarch

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All About the Monarch Butterfly

by Sandy Swegel

It’s Show and Tell time.
It’s time to take the kids or some curious adults outside and prove your superior knowledge of the ways of nature and introduce them to butterfly eggs.  It’s been a good milkweed year in the wild this year. Lots of spring rains followed by warm days have made the perfect home for milkweed plants.  Milkweeds are growing in my garden and along roadsides and ditches.  If milkweed plants are fully grown…mine are in tight bud about to bloom…you can walk up to almost any plant and look under the leaves and find little tiny white monarch butterfly eggs.

Milkweed plants, Asclepias, as you probably know are the ONLY host plant for the monarch butterfly.  The butterfly lays her eggs on the underside of the leaves. The eggs hatch hungry little larvae that chew up the leaves.

The larvae get big and fat and eventually form pupae, also on the underneath side of a milkweed plant.

Finally, “ta-da” a monarch butterfly emerges.

I have two favorite kinds of milkweed plants in my garden.  The “showy milkweed” Asclepias speciosa with the big pink seed head you’ve seen in fields, and “Butterfly weed” Asclepias tuberosa which is my favorite because it’s bright orange and looks good in the dry August garden next to the Black-eyed Susans.  It also makes a great picture to see a Monarch butterfly on one of the orange flowers.

Monarchs are happy to choose either of these two “milkweeds” or any of the other more than 100 different species of milkweeds around the world. So you can pick the flower you like and grow it in your own garden. Grow it and the monarchs WILL come.  I’ve had good luck with fall or winter direct sowing of the seeds that easily grow into blooming plants the next year.  After that, they reseed themselves gently.

Video links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=9Q2eORu1hP8

http://www1.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?title=Monarch_butterfly_laying_eggs_on_milkweed&video_id=51640

And, just in case there are any monarch butterflies out there that don’t know how to do this, here is an instructable!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Monarch-Butterflies-Egg-to-Butterfly/

 

 

Make Your Own Mud Puddle

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How To Attract More Pollinators

by Sandy Swegel

I’m always in search of how to do things more easily and efficiently in the garden. Once again today I was at the garden center eavesdropping and heard a typical customer question: ”What should I plant to get pollinators to my yard?” The answer the garden center owner gave surprised me.  I was expecting a list of bright colorful flowers that were good sources of nectar and some host-specific plants for butterflies. Instead, I heard the best and simplest answer to this common question: “There are lots of good plants to use,  but the most important thing you can do is provide a good source of water.” He then elaborated that it couldn’t just be a birdbath or water fountain…it needed to be shallow and ideally have the minerals pollinators crave.

So the quick and easy way to get LOTS of pollinators to your yard is to make mud puddles.  Or if you’re a bit tidier, a water sand bath.

Any way to get small puddles of water will work. You’ve seen this when flying insects gather around a dripping spigot, or when there’s a ledge in your water feature that water flows slowly over. In nature, pollinators gather along the edges of streams and lakes.

To mimic nature, take a plant saucer and fill it half with sand and fill with water to just over the sand.  The sand is the source of minerals and gives an easy surface to rest upon.  Bees especially will drown in deeper water.  To make it extra nice, sprinkle compost over the sand to add extra nutrients.  If you’re out in the country, a nice flat cow patty will do the trick…Put it in a big round plant saucer and add water.

If you’re in a very dry climate like me, the water evaporates much too quickly in hot weather.  The customer I was eavesdropping on at the garden center had a burst of inspiration: “I’ll put one of my drip lines in it so when I water the plants, the “puddle” will get water.”

A less elegant solution is to take a one-gallon water bottle and put a pinhole in the bottom and place it on some bare soil. Fill the bottle and water will drip out slowly keeping a mud puddle going.

I’ve put out an attractive saucer with sand, and a water bottle over bare dirt to see which works better. So far, the plain wet dirt is winning when they’ve got a choice. Now, why do I suspect they’d probably like the wet cow patty the best.

 

 

Pollinator mixes

Heirloom vegetable seed

Wildflower seed mixes

Buzz Pollination

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An Important Part of Pollination

by Sandy Swegel

We love pollinators at BBB Seed and we keep learning how many kinds of pollinators there are beside honeybees.  There are all the native bees and the moths and the flies.  Yesterday’s comely pollinator in my garden rounds was a giant bumblebee that was rather drunkenly going from iris to iris.  A bumblebee can be very big and noisy.  I could hear its buzz from several feet away. It was a delightful way to be digging weeds on a sunny day.

I wondered about the loud buzz and big hairy size of the bumblebee.  A little Googling later and sure enough, the buzzing is an important part of the pollination. I love how this bee pollinates. It has its own kind of pollination: buzz pollination.

The bumblebee flies up to the flower and literally grabs onto the flower tubule and starts to vibrate up to 1000 times a minute.  All that vibration makes the loud buzz.

Botanist Mario Vallejo-Marín wrote in a fancy scientific journal about buzz pollination: “The bumblebee has to hold on because the vibrations are so strong that otherwise, it could come flying off the flower.”

Wow.  Just to make the process even more dramatic, the bumblebee maximizes its pollen pickup by using its hairy body to create static electricity as it flies. As soon as that bumblebee hits the pollen, say hello to static cling.

Bumblebees remind me of Tim Allen’s old TV show Home Improvement.  Tim always wanted “More Power” when working in his shop.  The bumblebee has “more power”! Its little motor generates a powerful electrostatic field.  Then its bee vibrating motor sends pollen flying everywhere which effortlessly clings to its hairy body like Velcro.

Gotta love how clever nature is.

Photo Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee

Hummingbird Moths aka Sphinx Moth, Hawkmoth or Hornworm

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About These Important Pollinators

by Sandy Swegel



When we think of pollinators, we think of bees and butterflies, but one of the larger groups of pollinators are moths.  They go from flower to flower looking for nectar and their hairy faces and bodies pick up lots of pollen that get taken to the next flower.  Most people think about moths just when they notice the moths flitting around the porch light at night, but gardeners see moths all the time without even realizing it.  The little white “butterflies” around our veggie garden are cabbage moths.

One of the most intriguing moths in the garden is the Sphinx moth or hummingbird moth.  It hovers especially over flowers, especially at dawn or dusk, looking for super sweet nectar. Most people think it’s a hummingbird the first time they see one.

Unique Facts

They are the only moth that “hovers” over flowers like hummingbirds do, fluttering their wings rapidly while they “drink” nectar.  This is why they are called “hummingbird moths.”

They can fly very fast, up to 30 miles per hour. They can also fly swooping down as hawks do. This is why they are called “hawkmoths.”

They are big. Their front wingspan can be eight inches and their proboscis (for feeding) can be 10 inches.

They are more active at night but you can see them during the daytime too, especially around twilight.

They find their flowers from a distance by their scent.  They love sweet-smelling flowers.  Once close up, the use their vision to find white or light colored flowers. They often feed on the same flowers by night that the hummingbirds use during the day.

The weirdest thing about the hummingbird moths is that their larval form is a hornworm. Gardeners see them most often as the dreaded tomato hornworm.

They get their name The Sphinx moth because the larvae will raise the front portion of their body up when you disturb them, causing it to resemble the Egyptian Sphinx.

Flowers that are Pollinated by Hawkmoths:

Evening Primrose
Moonflower
Azaleas
Four O’Clocks
Peonies
Bee balm
Honeysuckle

These amazing hawk-sphinx-hummingbird moths are so useful in the garden, that now I have to let some of the tomato hornworms live just so I can have more moths around. Yikes.

Extension Fact Sheet about Hawkmoths

How to Start Mothing

Pollinator of Month

Slow Motion Video of Hawkmoth

How to Rear Sphinx Moths

 

Dowsing The Garden

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Communicating With Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

OK so this might seem a little weird.  And it’s not something I talk about with my clients. But some years ago, I realized I had studied everything there was to learn about plants.  I took the Master Gardener class, read all the best books, worked with the experts.  But despite this great expertise, I had to admit, that I would never be the amazing gardener my friend Barbara was.  True, she spent many hours working in her garden, but still she seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what her plants wanted. She tolerated my asking a million questions about why she did this or that in her garden, as if I could somehow write the plant care protocol that would recreate her artistry.  Alas, I was no plant psychic. I didn’t know how to talk to the plant spirits or fairies.  She didn’t talk about those things, but she’d say things like ‘I just planted it where the plant seemed to want to be.

About this time, I took a class in biodynamics and part of the class talked about dowsing.  This is super simple beginners’ dowsing:  a homemade pendulum – needle and thread, a necklace with a stone, even my car keys. All I learned was how to ask the pendulum what meant “yes” (clockwise for most people) and what meant “no.” (counterclockwise).  I myself use north-south movement for yes and east-west for no.

So off to the races I went…asking lots of yes and no questions.  I’d hold a plant at a place in the garden and ask “Is this a good place for this plant.”  If I had two kinds of fertilizer, I’d hold one of the plants and ask “is this the right fertilizer right now?”  One fertilizer would always give a much more positive response. I’d ask a plant, ‘Do you want to live next to this plant?”   It was amazing….and I wondered if it was real or just in my imagination.

 

So I secretly started testing plants with Barbara.  We were planting together at my house one day and I had dug holes where the new plants went.  When my friend wasn’t looking (because I was embarrassed at being silly), I’d hold my pendulum over the plant and ask it what direction it wanted to face. I’d actually ask? “Is this the right direction?” as I rotated the plant 360 degrees. I made a note of my dowsing results.  Then I asked Barbara to plant all the plants for me.  I was delighted to see that the directions she chose were exactly the same ones my pendulum told me.

I spent this weekend at a dowsing workshop and am learning so much about Earth Acupuncture and the many forces that influence our land.  I’d encourage you to give dowsing the garden a try.  Use it for plant location or type of plant or method of treating pests.  I even get out the pendulum when I can’t decide what seeds to buy.  I hope my pendulum over each seed picture as ask “Is this the right plant for my garden this year.”  I use this especially for things like tomatoes when there are too many choices.

There are lots of beginner books on dowsing or you can just play with your car keys sometimes. I’ve been experimenting with my pendulum long enough now to know it’s helping me make better choices.  Maybe it’s the plant talking or maybe I’m just tapping into my inner knowledge. But it sure is fun.

For more information, http://www.motherearthliving.com/gardening/garden-tools.aspx#axzz2zUObAKCy

Photo credit http://www.amazon.com/Dowsing-your-garden-gardening-houseplants/dp/1490326146; http://planbperformance.net/dan/blog/?p=693

 

Why I Love Ice and Freezing Rain in April

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Benefits of Freezing Rain

by Sandy Swegel

 

Last week was just beautiful and a bit unseasonably warm for Colorado.  Everybody started gardening and doing spring cleanups and setting out Wall of Waters for their tomatoes.

Then yesterday was a cold drizzling rain that turned to snow and then ice as temperatures dropped.

And I’m really happy about that.

The reality is that we’re in Zone 5 and our last frost date isn’t until May 15th.  So we are due for more cold freezing temperatures.  For gardeners, spring freezes are heartbreaking because it kills the blossoms on the fruit trees….which means no fruit. Last year a late freeze meant we had virtually no apples, peaches or cherries.  Very sad.

So yesterday’s forecast for temps in the 20s could wipe out our fruit again this year.

That’s where freezing rain saves us. 

First, the rain gets everything wet.  Then the rain starts freezing around the little flower buds on the fruit trees.  More cold rain falls and makes a bigger ice crystal around each bud.  Soon the buds are entirely encased in ice.  That means that while the air temperature may have gone to 23 degrees last night there are good chance buds protected in 32-degree ice crystals were safe and will live to bear fruit.  The insulating effects of freezing water are well known in the orchard industry where citrus growers set off sprinklers over the fruit trees when the impending freeze is coming.

Others may curse the ice-slicked streets and frozen windshields today after enjoying 70 sunny days last week.  But I’m delighted.  I see hope for a bumper apple crop.

 

Photo credit:  http://blogs.woodtv.com/files/2012/03/ice-on-peach-blossoms.jpg

 

 

Butterfly Love

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Loving Our Earthly Companions

by Sandy Swegel

 

I have friends who are serious eco-tourists.  They were the first people I knew to swim with dolphins.  Then they starting swimming or boating with whales, petting them and picking lice off whales. This year the trip de rigeur was down to Mexico where you can be surrounded by tens of thousands of flying monarch butterflies.  We mere humans don’t have wings, but down in the monarch migration zones, it’s almost like having wings. My friends were awed and literally touched by clouds of fluttering butterflies.  They appreciate and LOVE butterflies in a new way now.

 

The best thing about butterfly love? Or bee love or whale love?  It’s going to be what saves species.  When I was a kid, studying butterflies involved using straight pins to pin dead butterflies to styrofoam blocks.  Kids now go to nature camps or butterfly pavillions or good schools and become so aware of what magical creatures butterflies are that children become society’s butterfly protectors.  Last summer a friend wasn’t watching where she was going and was going to accidentally stomp on a butterfly as she was tromping in the garden.  One of the kids playing nearby wailed “Stop! Watch out! There’s a butterfly!”

 

So, find some ways to experience butterflies up close.  In Denver, we’re lucky to have a Butterfly Pavillion.  Almost as intense is a 3-D IMAX movie, “Flight of the Butterflies” now showing around the country.  Saving species, or saving the world is really pretty easy when the first step is learning to love our earthly companions.   The kids will explain it to you.

Photo credit and link:  http://www.flightofthebutterflies.com/home/

http://www.monarch-butterfly.com/

 

 

 

 

A Wild Thicket

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Keeping a Little Wild in Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

When it comes to our gardens, we Americans are of a divided heart. Deep in our ancestral memories are the manicured gardens of Europe.  We swoon over the groomed roses and delphiniums of England, We admire the orderliness of rows of Tuscan poplars. We see the almost mathematical grid of Versailles echoed in Jefferson’s Monticello. We use raised beds to confine our vegetables just as the medieval cloister gardens were enclosed.

 

 At the same time, we Americans are a frontier people, dazzled by the wildness and grandeur of raw untamed nature.  Grassy plains and dense woodlands and mountains majesty tug at our hearts even as we tend our suburban plots.

 

To fill the needs of our wild nature souls, I think it’s always good to have a wild area in our yard. One that manages to thrive only on what nature provides and provides a haven for small wildlife.  Generally, there is some place in your yard that already refuses to be tamed. Someplace wild plums keep sprouting and sumacs come unbidden.   This is the area to encourage in your yard – your secret garden, if you’d like – or just the area you see from your kitchen window reminding you that beneath the dishes and chores and children and jobs, you have a wild spirit too.

My favorite thicket started with the wild plums that kept coming back. Over time, a couple of chokecherries worked their way in, and the patch of lemon balm appeared all on its own.  Birds planted wild roses. Squirrels brought in nuts. I decided to play along with nature and seeded an unruly pollinators’ hedge filled with the nectar and pollen-rich flowering plants that bees and butterflies crave. I let the wild queen anne’s lace have some space in the back and I didn’t pull the dandelions. I did plant one of those tall dark purple butterfly bushes for structure and I seeded a buffer zone of grasses and wildflowers to create a neutral zone of sorts between “The Lawn” and “The Thicket.” 

 I don’t really “garden” the thicket but over time I’ve planted some naturalizing crocus and daffodils and a handful of seeds a decade ago that keep the spring display stunning.  About the only care I give the area is water during really dry spells and a birdbath of water because butterflies and birds and bees need something to drink.

 I am proudest of my tended garden…the showy beds of vegetables and annual flowers, the elegant stretches of roses and flowering shrubs and tulips in Spring. But deep down, it is my thicket that I love the most.

Food Chains, Who Ya Gonna Love?

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The Beauty of Nature

by Sandy Swegel

 

Spring is such a good time for photos.  All life is bursting forth again and I’m enamored with the newness and uniqueness of everything. Daily I’m getting great email photos of nature showing up for the first time this year.  Some remind me nature can be awfully brutal too. As humans, we get to be at the top of the food chain, except for the occasional clever bear, bobcat, lion or other wild animals. But most of the creatures we love to see in Spring aren’t so lucky.

A clever photo I got this morning reminds me life isn’t so simple further down the food chain.  Nature is full of life and death.  Death mainly because most animals are food sources for new life further up the chain.  Here’s a picture I got this morning of the potential destiny of the cute ladybug I saw in the leaf litter: a photo from last May of a Cordilleran Flycatcher eating a Giant Ladybird Beetle.

Fortunately, nature creates such abundance that there are plenty of aphids and ladybugs and worms and birds and mice and hawks, bunnies and cats and foxes for everyone to eat to survive, reproduce and thrive.  Our opportunities as gardeners are to keep creating natural habitats in places: planting lots of flowers for the insects to eat, and make sure that there’s ample water for insects and bees and birds and mice and hawks and foxes to drink. (I’m not so keen on providing for the raccoons and coyotes.)  And don’t forget to provide hiding places like old dead trees and debris for babies to be born.  Spring brings the cycles of life to our attention.  Pay attention and enjoy!  And stay away from wild beasts that eat humans!