Having grown up with paper wasps, I see them somewhat differently. While they leave me alone in the garden, if their nest gets bumped (like in a canoe), they will defend it vigorously, and their stings are really painful. I don't think of them as non-aggressive, but rather as being very aggressive if you give them cause, and willing to leave you alone if you don't. Now mud daubers or dirt daubers have always seemed to me to be much more passive. I've been stung many times over the years by paper wasps, mostly as a child, but never by a mud dauber, even when I was knocking down their nests from doorways, etc. But worst of all are hornets. Oh, my. You do NOT want to bump into a hornet's nest (the ones that look like big paper footballs). Hornets and yellow jackets seem to me to be far more aggressive than the other wasps I'm familiar with. Eeeek. Right after we moved into this house, we had yellow jackets suddenly appearing all over the INSIDE of our windows. We were told they probably had a nest inside the walls and that it could be huge. But they started dying on their own shortly thereafter, and never came back. I was sweeping up piles of yellow jacket bodies for weeks. We were lucky that they expired on their own, I reckon. Might have been a very different story if they had hung around long. Marcia

Gorgeous pics on this thread! Hummer plants are so beautiful! Renee your album is fabulous. Birding nut, you must get great sightings of the hummers on the flowers from your front door and windows. Molanic, I agree awesome Trumpet vine, hope your neighbors appreciate that too. :) My Hummingbird Garden is in the back yard. It has the most hummer plants, although there are other ones scattered in the rest of the yard. These 2 pics were taken in July - front and back of the Hummingbird garden. Then in August and September the annuals start to come on strong - like the Zinnias, Salvia, and Cardinal climber.

Thanks, guys. Those glass flowers are amazing! I wish the pictures could be enlarged to see the detail. I have this vague memory that I might have seen the real ones many, many years ago when I visited Boston. They truly are exquisite works of craftmanship, and glass is such a classy material compared with Sculpey clay. It has a translucency that's hard to get with polymer clay. If I make the Sculpey clay really thin, though, the light passes through and makes the petals glow in the sunshine. I'm always striving to get this effect, but it's hard to do. When clay is pressed this thin, it tends to slump either in the forming or in the baking stage. It is definitely a labor of love, but then so is gardening for hummingbirds and feeding them. It is such a thrill to make a feeder and watch them head right for it, take a sip, and zip off, disappearing to parts unknown. Some of my flowers are quite a bit larger than life, and I sometimes chuckle to myself and wonder what those little hummingbirds are thinking when they see a Salvia coccinea that is 3x bigger than it ought to be. "Ay caramba! That's the biggest salvia I ever saw!" I've had my share of failures, but have gotten better and better at making them hummer friendly. Although I try to make them works of art, they remain, first and foremost, functioning hummingbird feeders. Here's a couple more: A NOTE TO CS7580 (Otherwise known as Connie, I think)--If you're seeing this, I just wanted you to know that I tried to send you an email by going through your member page, but I think it didn't go through. I know you were interested in trying to make your own Sculpey clay feeders, and I remembered some instructional things I hadn't mentioned in my original post that might help you with your efforts. If you're interested, maybe you can send me an email by using my member page. Hopefully, it will work for you. Once I have your email, I can get those extra instructions to you. They are very important, and I think you'll have trouble being successful without them.

Glenda - you may need to wear goggles to protect your eyes if you go out on the porch. lol Good photos - very clear. I haven't seen more than two hummingbirds at a time here but my coral honeysuckle and Dropmore Scarlet are blooming so they may be visiting those as much as my feeders. I hope I have more than what I'm seeing. Wish the coral honeysuckle was closer to my window so I could watch it easily.