Daisy Fleabane...The Welcome Friend

   I have a hard time calling anything a weed until it proves that it is destructive to the gardens, pets or people.  In fact, wildflowers have made their way into the Small Gardens and are about as welcome as any other plants.  In fact, it is a well known fact that some have been dug from roadsides, marshes or creek beds to be planted in the gardens.  Who in the world would do that?  Me!  I figure they are happy additions to the gardens as wildflowers add points of interest and they bloom with wild abandon whenever they please.  Wildflowers are not particularly bound to any set season like the over-meddled with seeds we plant. This morning as I was out picking broccoli, some gorgeous flowers were the first thing that I noticed in the garden. Daisy Fleabane!  Ahh, my good friend, it is grand to see you and I hope the freeze tonight does you no harm.  The fleabane was sort of crammed in a nook with some lilies, chives and wood sorrel.  Obviously, they all get along well and have no quarrel growing together in the same garden. I have no quarrel with any of them so they all stay.

  Daisy Fleabane by most folks' standards is a weed and has no place in their pristine gardens.  The plant would be ripped from the ground and destroyed.  This is not the smartest thing as these blooms are some of the first to open in the early spring and provide life-giving pollen and nectar for many pollinators.  Those very pollinators are the ones that visit our food plots and, without them, our crops will not produce.  I smiled when I saw my helpful wildflower friends and had to whisper a "Thanks!  Job well done, Little Plant!"  Folks, leave a few of the early blooming wildflowers as a gift to our ever-dwindling bee population.  Without the bees...we won't be here.

One Redeeming Quality

   Carpenter bees are some of those critters that can be a downright nuisance.  Those gals (yes, it is the females that do the damage) can bore their way through any piece of wood.  It is hard to stop them once they make up their minds that your house is their house, too.  The female will start boring a tunnel into any chosen piece of wood and keep going until she has decided that she has enough nurseries for her babes.  That long tunnel was built with little side chambers to house an egg and pollen/nectar ball.  She does all the work herself with no help from her mate.  In fact, she is a loner and does not have a hive of worker bees to help her.  She does it...ALL.  Sometimes if she lives long enough, she will reuse her tunnel but, more oft than not, she dies from the toll that this work takes on her.  

  I was out working in the Small Gardens this morning when I noticed that dozens of carpenter bees were busy in the Mexican Hydrangeas.  The flower heads were literally crawling with bees.  These were bees that had just become adults and were out foraging for pollen and nectar.  They will keep busy between now and time to settle in for the winter.  Come spring, they will crawl back out of the tunnel and then start hunting mates.  The cycle will start anew with one lucky female claiming the old tunnel if the original female has died while the others will start drilling their own.

  With all the damage these bees can do to wooden structures, it is a good thing that they are important pollinators.  That is their one redeeming quality...other than the fact that they are extremely slow to sting.  Back when I was a kid, Granddad showed me how to find and plug the tunnels to make it harder for the bees to do too much damage.  If the female had to keep starting over with her tunnel, she would usually move off to a dead tree and leave the house alone.  I guess, I had better be on the lookout for those small round holes being drilled into the house, shed and greenhouse.  Let me find some plugs!  Not that it is going to do much good but, at least, it makes me think I am saving the Little Bayou House from collapse!