Last week in the garden: June 5-11, 2022

I take a lot of photos of plants, insects, and birds in our garden that I post on Facebook and Instagram, but never make it to my blog. I’ve decided to make some “This week in the garden” blog posts to share my observations with you here. I’m starting with what I saw and posted on social media last week. Note: the date that I took the photos is in parenthesis, but may not correspond to when I actually posted them.

Collecting seeds from spring flowers (June 10, 2022)

Today I collected Field Pussytoes (1st photo) and Prairie Smoke (2nd photo) seeds before they all flew away.

I use organza bags to collect seeds from some other plants. I’m not really sure when to collect Foamflower seed (3rd photo), so the bags will catch them whenever they drop off. Wild Geranium seeds shoot out of the seed pods when they’re mature, so the bags are useful for catching them too.

Bathing Blue Jay (June 11, 2022)

This Blue Jay had 7 baths in a row. Here are before and after photos.

A different crowd: small bees visiting Philadelphia Fleabane (June 3-11, 2022)

Most of the pollinator activity in the back garden is at Philadelphia Fleabane flowers right now. I’ve spotted so many different insects that I’ve divided my photos into 3 different posts. Here are a variety of small bees; bumblebees have zero interest in the flowers.

1. a green-eyed bee, 2. a leafcutter bee, 3. a small solitary bee covered in pollen, 4. and 5. Small Carpenter Bee, I think, 6. a bee with its tongue visible while drinking nectar, 7. stripey bee with lots of pollen on its back legs, 8. a tiny, bronze-coloured bee.

Flies on Philadelphia Fleabane flowers (June 3-11, 2022)

There have also been different kinds of flies at the Fleabane flowers. I believe that they’re all flies because their heads are almost all eyes, and they have very short antennae.

1. Calligrapher Fly, 2. This one looks like it ate too much. 3. a house fly, 4. maybe a robber fly, 5. a tiny fly.

Miscellaneous insects on Fleabane flowers (June 10 and 11, 2022)

Here are two other insects that visited the Philadelphia Fleabane flowers while I had my camera. The first one looks like some kind of beetle, and the second one is so tiny that it looked like a spec of dirt to the naked eye.