A bumblebee visit

One of my favorite warm-season garden activities is watching flower visitors. Bumblebees, carpenter bees, squash bees, blueberry bees, leaf-cutter bees, honeybees, butterflies, wasps, hoverflies, sweatbees, and hummingbirds collect either nectar or pollen or both.


I can't imagine why I ever (as a clueless graduate student) thought that this wasn't interesting, preferring the germination strategies of weedy species (hmm, at least that turned out to be useful).

But as a gardener, and garden educator, I've had SO much fun observing flower visitors, and encouraging other folks to watch.


This morning, a (female) bumblebee was foraging on one of the purple coneflowers in the front meadow, busily working through the fresh young flowers that make up the 'head' of a composite, collecting pollen (note her pollen basket) as well as nectar. I had to check with my gardening companion (uh, he studied pollination biology in graduate school) about their foraging habits!

Deep in flowers

I watched a bumblebee 'work' multiple flowers of a rhododendron early this morning. The flowers were beautiful and freshly open. It was head deep in a flower at times, using its legs to collect pollen. Watching different kinds of bumblebees visit flowers is fascinating.

Here, the small claw is visible at the end of the extended leg, in an unusual position for a bumblebee!

Depending on the flower's shape and size, and whether they're collecting pollen or nectar, they can hang around individual flowers gleaning lots of pollen, shoving it into their pollen baskets, or rapidly collect nectar and move on.