Peach pollinator extravaganza
If you have the
opportunity to plant a peach tree right outside your kitchen window, I
highly recommend it. For the last few days, I've been torn
between watching chicken
TV and pollinator TV as we eat our meals, but I think I might
prefer the pollinators.
I can identify
butterflies, moths, greater
bee flies, honeybees, and bumblebees from a distance, but the
rest of the pollinators are too small for me to easily distinguish
unless I snap a photo to peruse inside. If you've got a lot of
tiny native bees you're itching to identify, I recommend flipping
through Attracting
Native Pollinators,
or asking for help at BugGuide.net.
Or you can just watch
the tiny pollinators buzz around your blooms and guess how many
different species are present. They work just as hard even if we
don't know who they are.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I heard on the radio the other day how some backyard gardeners in the Bay Area are hand pollinating their fruit trees with a soft paintbrush because there are so few honeybees and native pollinators around. How sad is that!
~ Mitsy
I have always been very carefull with chemicals. When in doubt, I don't use it.
We have several varietys of wild bees and fliying insects/butterflys to polinate our flowering trees, bushes and plants.
We have a honey locus tree that is abuzz with the vibrations of many many many bees when it is in flower.
We both grab the lounge chairs and sit under the tree and vibrate right along with the tree. It is very relaxing.
The only year we did not do this because we had a bald faced black hornets nest in the lower branches. We left the tree alone that year. I didn't have the heart to distroy the nest until it broke apart during a winter storm.