Keep trying

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly, likely female, on Anise Hyssop. September 2026.

One of my new favorite plants is the anise hyssop. Anise hyssop grows to about four feet with long flower clusters at the end of each upward branch. These clusters each have what looks like about 100 flowers. The large one in the photo above has approximately 50 clusters. (I had to count them for a pollinator study I participated in.) The weight and height of the branches causes them to bend a bit, making them look like a flower arrangement to me. The flowers don’t bloom all at the same time, but over the past two seasons ours has peaked in late June through mid-July, after which some of the flowers begin to do whatever propagation chores the plant must do.

Same bee, different photo from July’s. Note more flower clusters in the background. July 2026.

The hyssop attracts many pollinators. I participated in the Great Southeastern Pollinator Count two weeks ago, choosing this plant because it had so many flowers. I counted mostly Eastern bumblebees and a little wasp about a half inch in length. Others included a very small bee, ants, another kind of insect I’ll just call a beetle, and the biggest dang wasp I’ve ever seen! I looked it up, and I’m sure I saw a Great Black Wasp. I’ve seen three different maximum lengths ranging from 1.4-2.0 inches. I swear it was about 2.0 inches in length. Absolutely huge.

Yesterday I saw our lone species of hummingbird here in the SE United States, a ruby-throated one, also checking out the hyssop. It seemed to prefer the similar-looking flowers of the obedient plant quite near me. And both yesterday and today the several hyssop plants in our yard have been caught the attention of Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies.

When I began the census count, I lamented to my wife that most of flowers have long past their peak. I expected to find few pollinators compared to June-July. The purple coneflowers have lost all their petals; the spiky centers remains, attracting goldfinches to the seeds, not pollinators to the pollen. Similarly, the black-eyed Susans and Indian blanket flowers have mostly disappeared.

But strangely (to me), the hyssop seems to have popped out more flowers! Over the past three days bees, most of the Eastern carpenter variety, have been madly jumping on the hyssop flower clusters. From a distance they’re visible by watching the ends of the stalks bouncing up and down in a non-existent breeze. And then there’s the apparent delight some butterflies have taken in finding yet more flowers on the hyssops.

We need to keep trying, keep putting out those flowers of attraction. It makes a difference. Perhaps “carpenter bees” aren’t your thing. Perhaps you dislike benign-but-huge “wasps”. No matter. Our purpose is to flower. Let the rest take care of itself.

Our sunflower

Eastern honeybee (?) on just opened sunflower. July 2025.

I feed birds, mostly black-oil sunflower seeds. This year it looks like I’ll through about 400 pounds of them. Apparently one got planted in our newly landscaped front yard, and there amid many of the similar-spiky Obedient plants was this lone sunflower. I love sunflowers. Therefore, I got pretty irritated when something, probably a deer, nipped off the top where a bud had been forming. The joke’s on the deer, though. By trimming the plant, it put up TWO stalks from where it had been lopped, each of which had buds…until one burst open on Independence Day.

Goodbye, June

Eastern carpenter bee working the beebalm. June 2025.

I opened the month shooting photos of the beebalm with a swallowtail butterfly on it. This photo is from the same set. The swallowtails, bumblebees, and little tiny bees I haven’t identified yet all had to work around the behemoths of the flowers, the carpenter bees. At 1.25-1.50 inches (or more!) they pretty much go where they want to. Now the beebalm has slowly dropped all those fuchsia-colored petals. (Or are they petals? I don’t know much about plants.) All that remains are the ball in the center, still suspended on those long stems. Our new visitors love these: goldfinches. They flit from flower to flower, their nearly weightless bodies hardly making the stems bend at all. It seems too soon for seeds, but what do I know?

Summer temperatures, documented a few days back, will continue for the near term future. Americans look forward to celebrating Independence Day on Friday, the 249th of our country’s existence. In these muddled times, I wonder what that will bring. Meanwhile, the business of life marches on, from the mundane (it’s Gather the Garbage Day) to the inconvenient (workers coming to work on the leak in the bathroom shower) to the calm and simple (my wife returned from a coastal sojourn yesterday afternoon; this day will be our first together in a week).

Have a truly blessed day, y’all!

Carpenter bees

Eastern carpenter bee on scarlet beebalm. June 2025.

For a good handful of years I fought a war against carpenter bees. These large bees (1.0-1.5 inches long) bored perfectly symmetrical holes in the decking of our house. First I attempted to plug all the holes with caulk, twigs, anything that came to hand. Then I bought horrendously over-priced traps, only one of which did its job and for only one year. This year I gave up, waved the white flag, said, “you win.” They are vigorous pollinators: that beebalm looks long past its prime, but they keep working the blossoms for that last speck of pollen. They’re only antagonistic to each other, although they’re scary in the spring: imagine a bee as big as your eye and flying right toward it. They still leave little piles of sawdust around my deck here and there in the spring.

And I still have the trap up. It’s a sign of self-respect. I don’t want to appear as if I’ve cravenly capitulated to them. Call it a fighting retreat.

Swallowtail

Watching our newly landscaped front yard has become one of my particular joys this year. Where once there existed a lackluster lawn, pockmarked with chipmunk burrows—which I had to continually mow—now new plants take turns proffering flowers for the pollinators. The spicebush swallowtail butterfly shown above would have shown up better were not its wings fluttering madly as it sampled the scarlet beebalm flowers. Sharing the butterfly’s zeal were bees of all sizes: little ones that looked like flying sugar ants about a quarter-inch long to bumblebees and something larger which I haven’t identified yet.

As May ended and turned to June, fireflies appear at dusk to illuminate the plants. Shrubby St. John’s wort, below, seems to be a favorite of the Easter honeybee.