Mad Monarch

                      Monarchs do not live on Milkweed alone.  This one lives along with a blissed out Bumble Bee on a stand of Joe Pye Weed, and the monarch seems to have gone mad, trying to drive the bee away, but without success.Joe Pye Weed has a wide reputation for a range of medicinal uses. Maybe the Monarch has a urinary infection.

Bee Friend

I don't KEEP bees, but I am using their honey in fermenting pear cider, so I am really sorry about that  rotted bee tree on the cliff near Green Pond that my brother and my cousin pushed over back there long ago. I am especially sympathetic to the native carpenter bees that I I so often encounter working on houses.  They like to drill holes in good wood, just far enough to lay their eggs in.  It isn't that they eat the wood and neither will their larva....it is just a one bee nest. It will safe nothing to kill them and while roofing, I have occasionally had one hang in the air a few feet away, watching.  And I don't object, though I have expressed to them my admiration for their hovering ability. I could also thank them for their work of polination along with the help of other native bees, now that the domestic honey bee populations are so sparse here.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed a cone of carpenter bee dust coming from behind a loosely attached sign on one one of the sheds, and pretty soon a carpenter bee noticed me.  She hung in the air a yard from my nose for a long moment, during which we did not speak, then I went on my way. 
   A few days later the bee you see here showed up when we were sitting out on the deck, and she seemed to know me.  'Also a day later. I haven't heard from her since but wherever she is, I am sure she is doing good work, hope she comes again ...or at least writes to us.

Dogs Plot Cider Crowing