EcoGardenista

  At last!  We have leafcutter bees in our garden!  We have been busy and traveling, so did not actually see them take some of these leaves for their nests, but we are so happy to see that they have found our garden in any case.  W e're watching for them now, noting that leafcutter bees are striped like a honey bee, but carry pollen on their abdomens (see image below).  They are solitary bees that cut circular pieces of leaves from plants such as Western redbud, rose and azalea. They then use these pieces to line their nest and also plug the spaces between their egg cells. You can find them nesting in wood, hollow stems from plants, or in other natural cavities. It is easy to encourage them to nest in your garden by providing them with some of these natural materials or even a 'bee hotel':  https://beegarden.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-to-build-and-use-bee-blocks.pdf California is home to over 1,600 species of native bees - more than any oth...

     Chickadee with caterpillar © Alok Singhal  some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC) Our local birds are in serious decline. The adult birds that are visit our feeders in fall and winter will start nesting in early spring. When they do, they will seek millions of caterpillars to feed their young. That’s right – the babies don’t eat seeds. Their throats are tender and they need thick, soft, nutritious caterpillars (think of them as ‘sausages’ for baby birds).  But caterpillars are increasingly rare, and many of our local baby birds face starvation each spring. How can we save them? Caterpillars grow primarily on native plants like the ones listed here:  https://bit.ly/Feed-Baby-Birds . Just as monarch caterpillars need native milkweed, checkerspot caterpillars need bee plant (scorophularia californica) and monkeyflower, acmon blues need buckwheat and lupine, sphinx moth caterpillars need clarkias. In short, we need to grow the plants that grow the caterp...