Bees
Nearly six months ago, Jane and I set a dilapidated small dresser out on our front porch with the intention of eventually getting it over to a local secondhand store, but we procrastinated and it started to fall apart. About the same time, I noticed that it had been taken over by a colony of honeybees. They've been fun to watch these past months and, although we have no intention of trying to harvest honey, my thought was that they would play an important part in pollinating our wildflowers in late fall and early winter when the native bees had called it quits for the year. My scaleleaf aster ( Symphyotrichum adnatum ) in particular always blooms so late that I do not get viable seed and I've always wanted to add this species to what I can offer others. The honeybee in the photo above is nectaring on a late-summer aster ( S . lateriflorum ) so it made sense to me that they would use the scaleleaf as well. They haven't touched it, however. Over the course o...