Work and the Garden

Some days you work hard in the garden and some days you sit around in the shade chatting half the day away on the topics of motorcycles, bicycles, sweet country roads and gnarly accidents, only to spend the rest of the day trying to capture your garden's pollinators with your phone camera. Yesterday, it was the latter for me and now I have a new pollinator to identify. I don't feel too bad about the slacking because the day before last was spent cleaning out and doing maintenance on someone else's yard, and because it's the days that I spend watching quietly in my own garden or talking with my neighbors that I learn and remember the most. I have the feeling that I will see this pollinator again. It seems to me that I have repeat visitors that must be nesting nearby. Right now I think it may be a kind of Cuckoo Bee that is wasplike in appearance, but further research is a must.

Luckily, I don't have to do any work identifying the butterfly below. It's a common buckeye, just like a tree I know and love. That Verbena bonariansis is at it again. Attracting pollinators like mad. Someday I may be sorry that I planted it and let it go to seed, but this year it wins first prize in the category of best garden volunteer.