Out and About in the Garden: Full Spring Edition

     Hi, folks! My apologies in advance if there's anything off about the tone, structure, or other minutiae of the writing in this one – I have a lot on my mind, and summoning up creative flow is proving a matter more of sheer willpower than of opening the floodgates right now. A lightning-quick rundown of the most important big distractions goes thusly: in three days, I get my first vaccination shot against covid-19, which I'm very excited about but which will also surely take me down for a couple of days with side effects (which for my husband were very light, but also very evident); six days after that, the operation described in the previous blog entry – the replacement of a cervical intervertebral disc with a custom-printed titanium implant and the fusing of two vertebrae – will take place, and I'm kind of nervous about the recovery period. In five days, we find out whether or not my daughter passed all of her high school final exams, and on the same day, the house I grew up in, which essentially represents anything that was ever good and safe about my childhood and young adulthood, goes up for sale – I will never see it again and haven't seen it in a very long time as it is, and I’m grieving for the loquat and guava and plum and Macintosh apple trees and the youngberry and concorde grape vines whose fruit is lost to me forever, the macadamia nut tree, the glorious gardens my grandmother devoted her life to, her loom and weavings, the huge potter’s wheel she taught me on and the table with no legs that she tiled, my grandfather’s book-smelling paper-filled studio and the walks through the woods and canyons where he taught me to love our world… the concrete and stone markers I made with my grandparents when we put in the new patio, the bamboo grove in which I was married, the immense Thorn of Crowns by which I spent many hours with the tortoise or one or another of the dogs or cats. So many things. All my last ties with the area are going now; even should I ever be in a position to travel someday, I can only go there as a nostalgic tourist forevermore, and then never again to My Home itself. But enough about me! This entry is about the garden.

     Because of what time of year it is, and how things are going out there, this particular entry is going to involve a lot about bees – so let's start with something else. The gulls. This year, for reasons which I will explain, we're having a much better time with them. I love gulls, but they have very particular needs and behaviors not well-suited to an urban environment, and thus it is illegal to feed them. However, long before we moved into this neighborhood, there was an old lady a few blocks from here who was a neighbor of an old lady who is my friend. She's long gone now, but apparently for a period of several years at least, she aggressively and enthusiastically fed the gulls from her own backyard, according to my friend piling her picnic table high with unsuitable foods such as entire loaves of white bread, fries, salami bites, smoked herring… all the stuff they love as much as we do. Gulls nest wherever they find flat surfaces (such as a roof) in proximity to food, and our neighborhood is, from a gull's perspective, one huge broken plane of flat roofs. After their benefactor passed away there was no reason to change their breeding grounds, given the sheer amount of trash people like to throw around and then yell at wildlife for getting into and the proximity of waterways and dumps and fried cod stands. When we moved here 10 years ago, every late spring/early summer was cacophonous. We had black-headed gulls, herring gulls, and lesser black-backed gulls in profusion, and although their breeding season is loud, it's nothing on the period during which they are weaning their young. Oh my god the screaming. Starting just before sunrise, continuing throughout the day, shrieking begging arguing harassed seagulls yelled their heads off in a welter of dialects right outside everyone's bedroom window.

The black-backed pair, however, are far too large and dangerous to make it worth it, so they're the only ones that didn't move on under the new circumstances. I like them, I wish I could make them my friends. They live a long time, and these two clearly have been here for quite a while. They’re as interested in me and what I do as the jackdaws and magpies are, but they also know that if I see them landing on my roof, looking at my feeders, I will chase them away. It makes me a little sad, but it's absolutely necessary.

flies, and anything else on the wing, but until I can find where that is and have a chance at some good shots of them, this crappy image (nonetheless the best one I've ever taken) will have to do you.

One stunning new denizen is this little lady: she's an aphid wasp, family Pemphredoninae. She's extremely small, about half a centimeter, and she is building her nest inside a beautiful, rotting, coiled stick I found once, named the Whale God, and hung on my fence. In these pictures you can see that she’s captured an aphid; their nests consist of cells bored into the wood, into each of which she will put between 10 and 20 aphids and lay one egg, sealing it up and beginning on the next chamber. What tickles me pink about these pictures is that out of all the types of aphid in the garden (generally controlled by the ants, ladybugs and other predators, and my choice of native garden plants) -- the light green ones, the dark green ones, the pretty much yellow ones, the whitish-pink ones, and the black ones -- she has chosen one the same color as herself. Isn't she pretty?

So! The bees. So far, this year, I have seen the following Queens: a common carder bee, a red-tailed bumblebee, two white-tailed bumblebees (the Really Big Ones), and a tree bumblebee. Drones and workers of all the smaller of these species are out there in profusion daily now, but most of the white-tailed toilers have yet to make the scene.

The bumblebees are not alone. There are honeybees, of course. Lots of honeybees. Then there's genus andrena, the mining bees and the sand bees; I'm not sure exactly which kind of sand bees they are, but there was a nest in the garden last year and I hope there'll be one this year, I do see the bees themselves. I've also seen white-faced mining bees, something that is probably some kind of brassy mining bee, these really neato bumblebees that seem to be some kind of carder bee but about which am having trouble finding information (I have written to the Museum of Natural History's nature identification team and am waiting for a response), and, new to me, common yellow-faced bees.

     Last year, as you may recall, the tree bumblebees chose to build a nest somewhere in the tangle of the honeysuckle but this year they're nesting elsewhere. It can't be far away though, based on how many I see. I’m pretty sure that the left-hand side of the rock pile (on the opposite side of the arbor from the one where I take most of my pictures of wolf spiders) now houses a red-tailed bumblebee nest, based on their behavior.

     I read somewhere that despite the amount of attention given to honeybees, it is actually the solitary bees, and even primarily the little ones like these yellow-faced bees, responsible for the majority of global pollination.

by the local bee conservationists is the importance of native flora. Bees, it turns out based on analysis of hives, will happily feed on nearly anything – I know that later in the summer, my passion flowers will become an apiaristic opium den – but when it comes to making honey for their young, they make it almost exclusively from native flowers. Certainly a lot of what I have out there isn't strictly native (most of it came with the garden), including a recent impulse-buy of a one-euro packet labeled "organic wildflower mix for bees", but I've made sure to encourage any particularly floral native plant that decides to set itself up out there.

Not too much else to say this time; the jackdaws, like one-year-old Bendy here (Freddy’s kid), are around all the time of course, but rather harried because the fledglings are about to emerge (even saw one already down the road a ways).

I still see Ziggy the starling, but he doesn't stay in my garden and serenade me anymore because right at the peak of early nesting season some jerkwad a few gardens down chain-sawed out the small cluster of juniper trees where he and his pals were starting a colony, so these days he only flies through on his way to or from wherever he goes now, but he does dip down and make noises at me on his way by if I'm out there.

go in the direction of poisoning. I'm glad the hedgehog is around to take up the slack.

     I guess that's about it for now; I'll do another one soon (-ish, of course, what with the open spinal surgery coming up for which they are going all the way through my neck so I'm probably not going to be in a position to dictate much for a few days) about summer proper, probably after the one I'll do about how it all goes under the knife and immediately after (not to mention that covid jab), so I'll leave you with these two images, depicting where I expect to spend all my time, weather permitting, for a while after the surgery with my new books. I just got both spots all spiffed up for myself, and in this way discovered that it most certainly appears that I have arthritis in my right thumb too, yay. But enough about me; behold instead my cool reading spots.

     So, my friends, stay well, stay safe, spread kindness, and remember to notice the little joys. Peace out.