Notes from the Summer Garden: Pollinators!

Hello there, friends!

Welcome to the garden! My name is Rafael (pronounced Ra-Fel), and I am a Skull Valley Flower Stand mom. I have the garden where the flowers you’ve seen all summer bloom. It’s a secret garden, but I will share a few of the secrets with you. One of you requested a note on pollinators—I love pollinators!

For instance, this one in the zinnia patch, unfurling its long proboscis to sip the nectar from the stigma of a ray floret, pulsating its fuzzy wings a million times a second…actually it’s more like forty times a second, but fast enough it can hover like a hummingbird. I can hear the soft purring of the wings. This one is a white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata), with flashes of pink and bars of white on her grey wings. She is blurred grace and airborne beauty. She flits from flower to flower, and then away.

My garden is a quiet refuge most of the time. I think of it as a safe space for these small, precious, life transferring agents…each one responsible for carrying pollen from anther to pistil, flower to flower so that viable seeds will form. Some are bees, some are butterflies, moths, birds, bats, beetles, flies…the list of intentional and unintentional pollinators is long.

Today, here is my list:

• Western carpenter bee (Xylocopa californica)

• Monarch butterfly (yes, a monarch! Danaus plexippus)

• Sonoran bumblebee (Bombus sonorous)

• Honey bee (Apis mellifera)

• Cute, fuzzy native bee with a striped butt (B. idon’tknowensis)

• White-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata)

• Hummingbird (no idea; she was in-and-out in a flash)

Fun Fact: Bees can’t ‘see’ true red, but they can see ultraviolet. Some flowers have ultraviolet color designs or “landing pads” guiding bees to the center with the nectar; we can’t perceive these patterns with our human eyes. Hummingbirds can see all of the colors we can see, and perhaps many more, combining the ultraviolet range with other colors.

Fun Fact: There are more than 1,300 native bee species in Arizona! How many have you seen? If you want to know a few of them, the University of Arizona has a handy bee identification poster here.

Fun fact: Did you know that monarch butterflies have a four-generation migration pattern? The first generation flies north from central Mexico (or some from the coast of central California); the second two hatch and feed in their summer grounds, and the fourth migrates south again. This one in the garden is likely on its way south. Tell me, how does it know which direction to fly when it emerges from the chrysalis?

That’s all for now; hope to see you again soon!

Rafael