A Post for the Pollinators and Garden Friends

One of my very favorite things about my stints in the dye garden is all the little buddies I find while I’m harvesting, weeding and tending to the plants. You get insect vision or something when you’ve had your head in the plants for a while. You can see so many more than you normally do. Sometimes they surprise me, sometimes we work side by side for a while.

Sometimes I’ll be holding a handful of freshly cut cosmos and a bumble bee will land on them in my hand. That’s a really special moment. I’ve also held a tiger swallowtail butterfly in the garden this summer after scooping it gently off a zinnia, and I’ve relocated little guys of all kinds who were in danger’s way. In the evenings, as the sun is setting, bees will curl up inside of the cosmos and snooze. It’s actually hard for me to cut the flowers sometimes, I honestly feel like I’m stealing from the pollinators. But! I just make sure to always leave some on the bush, make sure there are plenty of flowers on the bush when I harvest, and if a pollinator is at work on a flower I’ll pass that one up.

I’m not an entomologist, not even an amateur one. After this summer I definitely want to know more about all these little creatures, so I will track down their names etc. But for now, since we can still appreciate them, how they look and what they do for the garden without knowing them intimately, I’m going to group them in really basic categories. They might not even be in the right categories! Ha! But I’m doing my best with what I know at the moment, to share them with you <3 (p.s. also I love taking photos and I’m really proud of these little portraits, all photos are mine).

Bees