Ho-hum to Habitat: My Path to Native Bees

Ho-hum to Habitat: My Path to Native Bees - Resources

San Antonio's Festival of Flowers will resume this Saturday, June 3, 2023, after a break of three years. I've been given the opportunity to share how I garden, as well as a general overview of our native bees.

A link to a Google doc containing my handout (the info dense slides from my presentation) follows this list of resources. Note that if you didn't attend, some of the handout pages may not make complete sense.

Hyperlinks to more resources:

https://www.wildbeestexas.com/

https://w3.biosci.utexas.edu/jha/research/native-bee-communities

https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=TX_central

https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeginnerBeeFieldGuide_11March2022_LowRez.pdf

https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/nongame/native-pollinators/bumblebee-id.phtml

https://www.pollinatorphotos.com/

https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yOIlJFjzgAlhc5nfTXkqrVutPxWHLwfQ/view?usp=sharing

Comments

A Plant with Purple Leaves

There are a couple of groups on Facebook where I lurk and occasionally dip my opinion into the fray. They're places where people with knowledge of unbelievable scope can be observed, deftly identifying this obscure native plant or that scraggly left-behind orphan found in the backyard of a newly purchased home. One such backyard orphan recently was posted in need of identification. If it were a native plant, two people on "Texas Flora" would've named it within minutes. Even the taxonomy of those impossible grasses is typically put to rest in seconds. Not so with this poor guy. At first I was fairly certain it was one of the purple leafed basils, maybe 'African Blue'. It's fairly impossible to find it still thriving in a Texas January, but two plants in my yard are still hanging in there. They even look like they'll come back if we don't have a deep freeze before spring. BTW, this basil has one heck of a botanical monik

Seasons are Changing on Subscribing

You are clearly a discerning group. There are less than 100 of you and I'm deeply grateful for each and every one. However, I'm about to lose all of you. Blogger's "easy to follow instructions" to export my subscribers to a CSV don't seem to apply to me, even though I actually do know what a CSV listing is. After searching every single aspect of my blog, every bit of minutiae behind the curtain, I found a list of "followers". But there was no "Analyze", no "Email Subscriptions", nor "Manage Your Email Subscriber List" to open a new page to then export. So here's my request for a early fall/late summer activity. Once Blogger gets its subscribe feature working again, or I decide it's worth a move to WordPress, could I possibly trouble you to follow me again some day? I'd be ever so grateful. Otherwise, hope to see you at a Garden Bloggers Fling or even out gardening. See you again soon and thank you

Pansies and Crape Myrtles

This winter I've found myself thinking a lot about my grandmother. It took me a while to realize what was triggering the memories, but I finally realized it was two things: purple pansies and crape myrtles. We lived in the Mojave Desert when I was a child, and Grandma always kept a bed of purple petunias growing in front of the house. Given the heat, the sand, and the lack of available moisture and nutrients, you can imagine how much fussing she must have done over those straggly plants to produce blooms. She really wanted violets, but learned to settle for and appreciate her pet petunias. They were unfailingly deep purple - as if they didn't come in any other color. Here in Texas, winter is an ideal time to enjoy pansies. (I know - pansies, not petunias.) You see them mass planted in commercial landscapes and popping out of pots on front porches all over town - the masses of color almost always including Grandma's purple. So, I think of her and how much she would have en

Playin' Outside

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