In the gardener’s world it’s the robin who gets best friend billing. Be it perched on a fork handle, head cocked to one side or daintily fluttering down onto freshly dug over clods to pull a juicy worm.
But of course therein lies the rub. The robin only offers the wing of companionship to proper gardeners; those who dig spits and turn over the earth. The container gardener with their bags of multipurpose and dibbers hold no allure for the little red breasted fellows.
So without the traditional emblematic endorsement of the robin it’s nice to be adopted by another garden creature. And one with an even more garden mission critical role, the Chinook of the buzzies – the bee. This one lives a batchelor bee boy life under my shed. As I go in and out through the door, he crawls in and out under the floor and as I go round the plants watering and tieing he’s often doing some low level flying or perhaps more sensibly given his body mass/wing ratio some crawling.
I’ve no idea if he was responsible for the pollination of the tomato plants but it’d be nice to think it’s a possibility. Regardless, he’s welcome to call under the shed home !
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Tomatoes are self-pollinating and don’t need the bees’ help, as this post from ‘Daughter of the Soil’ explains. But many other crops and plants require their services, and they’re not having a good time at the moment, so we gardeners should do our best to encourage them into our gardens. They probably enjoy your marigolds too.
The bumblebees have been loving my raspberry flowers this year, and an excellent crop looks likely. I like watching them working away while sitting in my garden with a mug of coffee.
Enjoyed the article – the F1 F2 concepts is something I need to give myself time to get my head round.
Watching bees is very soothing – today I watched one go from clover flower to clover flower – my guess is they must have some system which keeps them to keep moving to a fresh flower each hover – beenius !
Your shed seems to be a giant solitary bee house!
The actual solitary bee house I bought for my Dad just contains some spiders. Disappointing.
J x
Those spiders need to be given their marching orders ! But beware I may be blessed with a bee under the shed – but as for my actual house – very big spiders ! So maybe the bee house might be the best place for them after all !