With Echinacea’s flowering reaching its peak, there isn’t a better idiom to describe the team’s work schedule for the week. Remnant phenology, independent projects, and a large scale compatibility project are just a few of the tasks being carried out on a regular basis. As for the pollinator project Maureen and I have been working on, things are going great. After alternating back and forth between P1 and P2, we have accumulated over 60 observations, which is a little over half of what we are aiming for. Towards the beginning, we saw mostly small green bees, but recently we have started seeing more and more of the larger bees, such as Melisodes and Andrena. For example, we added 7 more Andrena observations just today, which more than tripled the Andrena observations we had up to this point. Things may be a little hectic at Team Echinacea headquarters, but this doesn’t mean we are all work and no play. Just tonight we enjoyed a post work bonfire with s’mores, badminton, and croquet. You might even say it was the…… bee’s knees!
And just in case this post didn’t contain enough corny pollinator references, here’s a couple of pictures of a pair of Melisodes teaching us a lesson about the Birds and the Bees.
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