June & July Summer Blooms

As I looked through my SD cards in my camera today, trying to clean them off, I realized that I had taken a lot of native wildflower pictures.  Every year, I try to document via pictures all the wildflowers that are blooming each month, so that I can see the progress we're making. There are several that do very well here and, in spite of the very hot, dry weather we've had, they are at least daring to spread their petals and square off with the intensely hot sun.

Late June Bloomers
These were planted in December, 2014.  They did okay, in 2017 but at the end of June this year, my gray-headed coneflowers were kickin' it in the west savanna area.

Gray-headed coneflowers

Black-eyed Susans

Virginia Mountain Mint

Butterfly Milkweed (bloomed from June through July)

Ox-eye Sunflower

July Bloomers

The heat intensified in July, but still, the wildflowers were determined.

Lobelia

Royal Catchfly (red) and Black-eyed Susan

Even more Gray-headed coneflowers bloomed in July

Ladino clover seems to love the heat

Queen Anne's lace (wild carrot)

And 4 years after planting - looky, looky who showed up!!  Royal Catchfly - there were 4 plants this year (also planted in the Savanna with the Gray-headed coneflowers).

The Partridge pea started blooming in early July, but has really been showing off since the last week of July into August.

Partridge Pea

Of all the blooming flowers I thought the honeybees would love, the sumac was not even on my list! But, turns out sumac is one of their favorites here.  So, I guess I'll let it stay.

Smooth Sumac - only 1 of 2 flowers on this page that the honeybees seem to really like.

Rose Pink

The Rattlesnake Master is spreading like crazy - it has basically taken over my specimen garden, ousting most of the coneflower varieties there and only the prairie blazing star is hanging on. Since it's a native wildflower and all kinds of bees and butterflies love it, I'm not going to try to stop it. It's too hot to try to fight it. The clever prairie blazing star has managed to spread to other parts of my field, so it has figured out how to outrun the rattlesnake master.

Prairie Blazing Star in a field of Rattlesnake Master.

Wild Quinine

Turns out, the most favorite plant on my property for the Bumblebees have been all the St. John's Wort bushes I've planted.  They are crazy about it...unfortunately, the Japanese beetles are too. *sigh*
Interestingly, I haven't found one honeybee on the St. John's Wort and the Bumblebees are enjoying a pollen Bonanza!

St. John's Wort

I have a lot of favorites, but Wild Bergamot scores in the list of my top-five.

Wild Bergamot

Trumpet vine

We plant a LOT of red clover - the Bumblebees love it and the Honeybees don't use it (due to the difference in the length of their "tongues").  Guess who just bought 50 more lbs. of red clover? Heh!

Red Clover - Bumblebees LOVE it!

Common Milkweed and Wood Sage

Bindweed - the flowers are open in the morning, but close up when the temperatures start rising.

Ironweed (with Queen Anne's Lace in the foreground)

Prairie  Fleabane

This picture doesn't do the wildflowers justice - Wild Quinine, Queen Anne's Lace, Coneflowers, Sumac and Prairie Blazing Star are just a few of the predominant native wildflowers you can see here (click on the picture to get an enlarged view - that's true for all of them).

July - Wild Quinine dominates, but it will soon retreat and another will come up to carry us into Fall.

Passion Flower

Wood Sage

Lastly, a few of which we're not sure

Wild Potato Vine?

Well, I have searched & searched and we thought the vine & flowers in the picture to the left were either a variety of Morning Glory, or "Redvine"; but the best online site I can find calls it "Wild Potato Vine"

UPDATED 8/15 - Thanks to Chuck Yetter & his wife, these have now been *correctly* identified -  they're called "wild petunias". 

A field of wild petunias - you're welcome, Chuck!  :-)

Field full of "wild petunias".

Out of all the flowers above, the only ones I've found that my honeybees really like are the Butterfly milkweed and the Smooth Sumac.  I've been searching all my August blooming flowers and haven't been able to find from where my honeybees are getting their pollen and nectar stores for the Fall.  Today though, my investigation may have identified their source.  Stay tuned....pictures and details are forthcoming!

My Blue Moon Martins

I still have 2 pair of purple martins here with their young.  Two nests with 5 nestlings each, chirping away, preparing for flight.  Thanks to all the rain through July, there is a veritable bounty of dragonflies, butterflies, bees, and many, many more insects flying these days, so there is plenty of food for them.
I passed by my native wildflower specimen garden yesterday and as I quietly watched all the insects, flitting about, I thought, "hey, make a movie to show this and you can set it to music"!  Then, it suddenly occurred to me - I had all the background music that I needed and as I listened, it made me grin, ear-to-ear as I compared them to human parents trying to get their stubborn teenagers to do something they didn't want to do.  HA!  Even birds have to deal with teenagers!
My 2 pair of adults were flying about, screeching to their kids to come fly with them and they even made a couple of cameo appearances in my movie below.  "It's time to go!" they seemed to say with a great deal of urgency.  Their many different vocalizations made me laugh and snort while taking the flower garden video.  They sounded like they were trying to be very stern and convincing, attempting to get the youngsters to launch.  It's surprising how loud they were - it was even more surprising how loud their kiddos were as they chirped back to their parents, demanding another bug. 
It worked for one gourd as all the young from one of them finally fledged yesterday.  Today, I only see the one remaining pair, persistently trying to coax their young out.  There are regularly 8-10 visitors here every morning, but for such a social bird, they are surely desperate to leave and join the larger flocks at some of the roosts.
Enjoy the video - both the visual beauty of the insects, but also the beautiful audio.  I think it's one that I'll listen to several times over the winter months, until the next season begins.

An Ozarks Mason Bee Project - Part 1

I’ve been reading a lot about the plight of the honey bees for years now and wondering what I could do to help them.  Some people, like our local friend Andy, have setup honeybee hives on their property.  I had thought about doing that, but after listening to Andy’s experiences, now I’m glad I didn’t.  I hate getting stung by any flying or crawling insects and apparently, even with protective suits, sometimes you still get stung.  The costs of getting started with honey bees really weren’t very appealing to me either.
My desire to help the honey bees became even stronger this past year after watching several documentaries about the problems they’re encountering.  This “TED” talk by Marla Spivak was very interesting, well done and enlightening. The solutions she talks about are so obvious and simple, it makes you wonder why more people haven’t already put them into practice.

http://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing.html

Nevertheless, the honey bees are not the only bees that are in trouble.  My problem for the last 2 years has been dealing with the question of, “where do I start and how could I really make an impact”?  Turns out, the impact I can make starts in my own backyard.  I learned last year that there are actually more benefits and less costs involved when raising Orchard Mason Bees.  One of the benefits delighted me; Mason bees are actually more docile than honey bees and are less likely to sting!  Woohoo – I can dig that!
Orchard Mason Bees are also supposed to be better pollinators than honey bees.  They will work in cooler and damper weather as well.  Why are they better pollinators? They carry pollen on the underside of their abdomen and then scrape the pollen off within their nesting hole. Because the pollen is carried dry on their hair, it is more easily transferred, resulting in significantly more pollinated flowers than their cousin, the honey bee, who wet the pollen they carry on their legs.

http://www.crownbees.com/what-makes-mason-bees-such-good-pollinators/

http://www.citygirlfarming.com/Bees/MasonBeeInfo.html

http://www.citygirlfarming.com/Bees/BeeKeeping.html

Step 1 is to plant food to attract the bees - native wildflowers. The native wildflower project has been ongoing since 2007 and am loving the results.  But I had to smile to myself as I had uncovered yet another hobby where I would have the challenge of providing food for something I was inviting to my backyard. 
Step 2 is to provide shelter and housing. 
In researching mason bees I found that there are many simple ways to attract and provide housing for them.  If you search the internet, you will find tons of cool pictures of logs and various other natural things that can be drilled out and placed together to make visually attractive housing for them.

However attractive they are though, to my disappointment, I learned these structures are not very practical or safe for the bees as they allow various parasites to also take up residence and kill the hibernating bees.  And the housing is not very easy to clean.
I realize these natural cavities are where 99% of the mason bees lay their eggs and somehow, some percentage of them survive.  At some point, I will probably grab a bunch of hardwood, reeds and other materials and build one of these beautiful structures and just burn the materials and start over with fresh-drilled wood, reeds, etc. every year.
While I'm talking about making your own housing, here is a fun project you can do with your kids to build your own bee housing.
http://www.nwf.org/How-to-Help/Garden-for-Wildlife/Gardening-Tips/Build-a-Bee-House.aspx

But for now, I wanted to be able to see this evolution of life and I elected to try artificial housing.
I finally found a really good source for housing and ordered 4 of these blocks.
http://www.masonbeehomes.com/pro-bee-block
Mason bees usually work within a 300 foot radius of their home, so I placed these 4 blocks in strategic places around my property.

4 houses - sides & top are cut from cedar boards and the roof overhangs almost 2".

This one was hung in front of the orchard on 4/28/2014 where cherry trees, elderberries and blackberries grow.

This one is located under a tree limb, facing south as required by the instructions, overlooking a large grove of black hawthorn (viburnum).

This one was hung in front of our Viburnum forest on 4/28/2014 that blooms om early spring.

I was afraid that I had put out my Mason bee homes way too late for our region, but I was hopeful that I might pick up some stragglers.  After all, the plum trees (our first early spring bloomer in this region) and the viburnum were still blooming!  Maybe I would get lucky my first year, but I'd have to wait and see.