Hello... :-) I haven't posted on the Winter Sowing forum for awhile. I didn't do very much winter sowing this year. I just stopped by and could identify with this thread. I have been saying for awhile now, that I feel like I missed the summer this year. I can't believe it is almost August 1st already! I've had plants blooming late, coneflowers started about 10 days ago and phlox 'David' is just opening today. Casa Blanca Lily has buds and none of them have opened yet. Nasturtiums in a hay rack have only just started blooming with the recent sunshine. They do look better than I ever remember them right now though. Begonias are doing very well with no mildew, which surprises me. Hydrangeas are having a bang up year, but my Annabelle has been on the ground from the weight of wet blossoms since it started blooming. Four OClocks just started blooming a few days ago. Oddly, asters are doing terrible, looking puny in one area, but in the front, my aster is already starting to bloom. Way too early, maybe it is confused by all the cloudy weather. I haven't seen any butterflies this year yet either. My butterfly bush is just starting to bloom. That's really late too. Haven't seen many bees either. The garden is actually looking pretty good right now though. I have a lot of Hydrangeas and some Astilbes and Ferns that love this weather. The grass never looked greener. I hit a sale for 3/$5 six inch proven winners the other day and I potted up two large pots that I hadn't gotten around to in the spring. They look great! Best of all, I have hardly had to water anything or turn on the A/C! It's been a strange year but I'll take it. Lucky terrene to have Bluebirds! How fun! Pitimpinai....what happened to you? Hope you are doing ok out of the hospital. pm2

It's not just salt water they want. We have a fresh water pool and it's not so much the water, but the white pipe around the return from the pool filter. My husband made valves where the water returns to the pool with 2 different shut offs. Depending how you adjust them one pipe returns the water directly in the pool. One has a spray head that sprays the water into the air over the pool to keep the water cooler in the summer because it gets way too warm if not. We live in South Texas, enough said and with adjustment it also makes water run down the slide.. The honey bees congregate all around the center of that pipe and more and more keep coming. Last year it was the white stair rail going into the pool, however we've been blessed so far, they are not aggressive at all. When I hook up the pool vacuum, I have to have my face ,hands and arms right in the middle of them swarming around me to get it hooked up and they haven't even attempted to bother me, Thank God!! I was a little concerned at first, but so far so good. Anyway, just saying, it's not the salt.

My daughter and I moved into a new place last week. Although pretty, the front yard was overrun with little purple flowers and high grass so I had to mow. There were several bumble bees hovering around and I apologized to them for mowing their flowers. They aren't missing out on flowers as there are tons more in other parts of the property. I'm not normally concerned with them, I've never had one hurt me. Today though one was hovering near the car when we pulled in the driveway. He would sporadically dash elsewhere for a few seconds, but Always, came right back to the car door...just hovering near the window. Basically, my daughter couldn't get out of the car as he seemed to be stalking her, and she was scared. He wouldn't even leave for more than a second when I tried to distract him with a bright yellow cloth. Why was he "stalking her"? lol It literally took ten minutes to get him distracted long enough for her to bolt through the door.

Wasps are very beneficial -- unless you are raising butterly caterpillars. Their sole food is caterpillars. Malcome Beck tells a story about a man who had a pecan orchard. His nephew came and spent the summer and for entertainment with a sling shot he knocked down all the paper wasps nests he could find. The man was plagued by tent caterpillars on his pecan trees for years afterward until the wasps were able to restore their numbers. Even though I have plants for the butterflies to use as food for their larva I let the paper wasps stay. There are enough caterpillars from other sources to keep them going and they don't take too many butterfly babies. Paper wasps are very non-agressive and I can reach near their nests, but they don't sting unless I inadvertently bump the nest. My wasps have come to recognize me, they are the genuises of the insect world, and even if I do bump the nest they just give me a little warning buzz fly by, or at most a tiny sting, so tiny I don't even bother putting anything on it. I've had huge nests hanging right over the patio door where people go in and out all the time and the wasps never pay them any mind. Now the big red wasps are a different matter. They like to nest in cavities like empty decorative bird houses in the eaves of the house and are more agressive. They are more likely to sting if you walk close by. Muddaubers are related to wasps and are very VERY non agressive. They are solitary nesters and don't nest in a group like paper wasps. You can be touching their mud nest and they do nothing. If you caught one in your hand and held it they might sting of course. The sole food of muddaubers are spiders which they collect and pack into the cells of their mud houses (which look like tiny pueblos to me) and lay a egg on them. They then seal the chamber and the larve feed on the spiders. Malcome Beck said he opened many nests and found 90 percent of the spiders contained in them were black widow spiders. Of course it depends on your population of spiders. I have found many spiders in the nest when I used to open them as a child that I had never seen before in the garden. While I like garden spiders -- they do their job in the garden also by catching insects, I appreciate that nature keeps bug populations in better balance than I could by using insecticides or knocking down wasp and muddaubers nests. I would never have believed it possible, but I have had no damaging insect problems since I stopped using insecticides. There are other types of wasps, some that nest in the ground that look like bees. I can stand and walk by the hole where they are coming and going and they never pay any attention. Neither do the large cicada killers. There may be some other agressive wasps, but I don't know about them. As to bees, which are the subject of this thread, they are very non-agressive when foraging away from the hive -- whether honey bees, bumble bees or other wild bees. I get right in the middle of them while they are working the flowers to take pictures and they just get out of the way. Happy gardening the natural way.