Playin' Outside

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/...

  Here's a link to the story of how a wildlife film maker in Bristol, England, made use of his time during the COVID lockdown, and the discoveries he was able to make in his own yard.  Grab your bowl of popcorn and click here to enjoy!  The sounds are almost as good as the photography. After you've enjoyed that visual feast, you might hop over to Sam Drogge's "Eye Candy" page on flickr .  His bee pictures allow you to get up close and personal with many of our native bees. And if you haven't already heard of Carol Leonardi Clark - as a Texas Master Naturalist, a very active member of the Native Plant Society of Texas, as a Monarch Steward working tirelessly as chairperson to Bring Back the Monarchs to Texas, as a math coach, or as an amazing photographer - well, let me hurry up and make the introduction!  As you can tell from the few of her many "hats" mentioned here, she's an incredible advocate for the natural world, especially here ...

Funny how the smallest things in nature can give us so much pleasure.  This past weekend I noticed that one of the new metalwork items in my garden had been blessed by the addition of  a line of lacewing eggs.    If you're not familiar with lacewings, click here to see the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension page on this fascinating and welcome garden visitor.  Delicate in appearance, they're fairly voracious and consume a long list of undesirable garden pests.   Fun fact, that little "stick" from which each egg is suspended is likely designed to prevent freshly hatched baby lacewings from eating each other! All material © 2014 by Vicki Blachman for  Playin' Outside .  Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.