Tag Archive | Center for Food Safety

Pollinators

Aug1
Not a pollinator, but I’m grateful for this roly-poly little kitty. I may have a new kitty: I came home from a lovely dinner tonight and saw a small black cat crying out beyond the compost bins. I put some food out. It will depend on Topaz, among other things. We’ll know more later.

I’m grateful for all the pollinators. I haven’t even cracked the manual for the new camera, and the current lens won’t give me the crystal clarity of the macro lens on the old camera, but I’ll get there eventually. Meanwhile, playing around with it this morning I caught a few pollinators doing their thing. Imagine where we’d be without them! So grateful for pollinators, and the fruits of their labors.

Honeybee pollinating tomatillos
Leafcutter bee on marigold
Sunflower bee on some floral surprise I thought was going to be a zinnia…

I’m grateful for the 4000 species of native bees in North America, and the dozens that forage and nest in my yarden. They’re responsible for pollinating about three-quarters of all our food plants, but their very existence is not well known to the general public. I didn’t know about them until I started raising and photographing honeybees, and paying attention to all the other pollinators I discovered through my camera lens. There aren’t nearly as many individual bees or bee species in the garden this summer, making me cherish them all the more. You can learn to identify and plant for native bees with the Wild Bee ID app put out by the Center for Food Safety, and enjoy some of my better photos while you’re at it.

I’m grateful for these rattlesnake pole beans, the first green beans that have thrived in my garden ever.
Grateful for today’s harvest of green foods, and for the pollinators that made them possible.
Garden to table…
Grateful for a healthy lunch partly from the garden (green beans, basil, fennel, parsley) and partly from the pantry (garbanzos, cannellini beans, olive oil, rice vinegar, and poison fish croutons).
Grateful for the first ripening tomato, and the pollinators, mostly bumblebees, that made it possible.