Unfortunately I didn’t fully clock the behavior as odd until after she’d flown off, in retrospect it’s very obvious what the problem was. You can see her trying to contort her legs to reach the mite, but that sucker is lodged in there. Wish I’d had the tools nearby to try and extract it from her.

MRW someone asks what they should put in their water dishes to attract more pollinators to their garden

The way this carpenter bee panics when her leg gets stuck in the stamen of the datura 😭

Also wanted to get a decent view from a distance, some of the bees are very smol so they’re hard to see in video, but it’s such a delight seeing so many bees just buzzing about the garden having themselves a wonderful time

The sweat bees got really animated this morning

Some more footage of what I believe is Beena Simone flexing her strategy on the much more accessible Mexican Petunia

Beena Simone has really gotten her technique down to a science, watched her hit a dozen or so blooms this way, completely upstaging her sisters.

Caught these bees momentarily working together to buzz pollinate this flower, it’s interesting seeing the different methods at play.

By this bloom, she’d largely worked out how to find where the nectar stores would be without entering the bloom, and this time she even figured out she can cut through the calyx to get further down without getting stuck inside

Eventually she works out that all these flowers hide their nectar stores beneath the calyx, and like the true fearless queen she is, she burrows down to the base of the flower to do her dirty deed

What’s cool here is the way she goes into the flower to make puncture marks, then goes outside the flower to find them and then rob the nectar from the outside, a process she refines on later blooms

Ah I just love them so much they’re so cute and silly