It being Tuesday, it’s only fitting to acknowledge St. Anthony with the prayer that Amy taught me: St. Anthony please come around, let what is lost now be found. She told me years ago that he is the patron saint of finding lost things, and Tuesday is the day to make your plea. I found the bees! I am so pleased. Some of them are surely venturing farther afield, but a new flower is opening in the garden, tiny clusters of blooms on the silver buffaloberry, and the tree is buzzing with bees. Not just honeybees, but a few wasps, flies, and wild bees as well. I planted this near-native multi-trunked tree years ago, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it bloom. Last year I pruned it back hard for the first time, after deer had broken a lot of its spiny branches scraping their antlers. And this year, rich rewards. What’s most interesting to me is that the bees are not feeding on the open blooms, but digging into the partially opened buds prying them open with their front feet, as if to be first to the riches.

and sharing!

Also, not sharing. Just before I snapped this, the wasp and a honeybee had a brief dispute about who got this cluster.

As the little irises start to fade and their leaves to grow long, the honeybees have left them to the wasps.

Bees and wasps were not the only treasures I found in the garden this week. Cynthia gave me some irises last fall when she thinned her burgeoning stock, and said they’d be fine left outside over winter. I’ve been looking all over for them for weeks, outside and inside, so I could get them in the ground, but nowhere could I find the black plastic pot I’d set them in to overwinter. I began to wonder if I’d actually planted them in the fall. The other day, I found them. Duh. Not in a black plastic pot at all, but in an open grocery bag inside a basket, up against the house wall where I’d passed it a dozen times a day. Oh the tricks that memory plays! I trimmed them and split them up and planted them yesterday afternoon, in an unsuccessful vegetable bed I’ve decided to dedicate to flowers.

Redwing blackbirds have been singing by the pond for weeks.

Something about this western scrub jay makes me think it’s a recent hatching, which with our relatively mild late winter this year seems possible.