What’s the best pollinator plant in the garden right now? Mint! Just plain old mint, grown from cuttings from the supermarket. The second best, native narrow-leaf milkweed. Although many of the insects are the same, some preferred the mint, shunning the milkweed. Variety is king!
Quite a swarm out there
Bees
These include sweat bees, hairy belly bees and cuckoo bees – along with the familiar honeybee. Other than the honeybee, the others are very similar, to where I thought they were the same species until I saw the pointy things on the abdomen of the cuckoo wasp.
Hornets & Wasps
There are yellowjackets, hornets, wasps in the vespid family. The species in the milkweed is not the same as the wasps that took over the bird house! Their faces are different, something I would never have known without chasing them around the garden with a camera (no, I didn’t get stung). The bird house is full of European paper wasps (Polistes). I don’t know what the guys on the milkweed are. I have no idea what the wasp in the milkweed is.
Flies
Some of these insects aren’t bees at all; they’re flies. Nonetheless, they appear to be gathering nectar and walking around on flowers, things that normally lead to pollination. They all seem to be syrphid flies. Some larvae of these flies eat aphids, so they’re a very good insect to have around!