bees in the bay breeze

It does take more effort to keep plants fresh and alive in this August heat. We're being vigilant with saving grey water for this purpose. And seeing the pollinators on plants feeding on nectar is a constant reminder of how important that vigilance is.

Today I obs...

Anna's hummingbird on a flowering potato vine branch

See how the Anna's hummingbird is blending right in with the vegetation of flowering potato vines and geraniums.

Excellent camouflage!

Umber skippers are very small butterflies, that could almost be mistaken for moths. They visit our garden very often, usually in pairs. They flit around, visiting nearly every plant, and don't seem to have particularly outstanding features.

But close up I think they ar...

Honey bee on brown fennel flower head

So much vegetation is drying up in the garden, but as I walked around the garden today it was so wonderful to observe honey bees on different plants.

The brown fennel plant is now producing a lot of flower heads. Although the plan...

 detail of part of a bee "condo" at the University of California Native Bee Garden in Berkeley

When we went on the tour of the Native Bee Garden, we were shown the bee "condo". Different kinds of potential nesting materials, such as untreated wood and large pine cone...

I was very fortunate to observe a female wool carder bee anthidium fabricius collecting fibers from the underside of Lamb's Ear leaves.

These bees scrape the hairs or fibers off the surfaces of leaves into a ball and carry it back to their nests where they stuff the ba...

 butterfly bush buddleja alternifolia flower cluster

 We provide food for butterflies too. The butterfly bush growing in a container pot in the backyard has grown a lot in height and width, producing these gorgeous flower clusters. So far we've observed cabbage moths,...

 Honey bee on a sunflower

Yesterday we went to a talk and guided tour of the Urban Bee Lab Experimental Garden in Berkeley. Docent Carol was full of information and interesting facts about California native bees.

88 different kinds of bees have been observed in the Be...

We've read about it, but now see how insects and other animals view colors in this article from the New York Times. So all of our lavender and blue salvia actually looks fluorescent green and those yellow zinnias are hot magenta to them ?!

http://www.nytimes.com/inter...

I know this isn't a big deal to people who grow a lot of produce, but we harvested all of these Early Girl tomatoes this weekend from one plant. They literally fell into our hands when we touched them, because they are ripe enough to eat.

They are small in size, but th...