Summer snow

Early this morning I went to check the irrigation to the olive trees up the hill. When I came back toward the house, I noticed the hood (bonnet) of the car was covered with a thin layer of what looked like snow. Mid-July doesn’t often give us that phenomenon. Sure enough it was tiny blossoms that had fallen from the privet trees near the car.

The trees were alive with bees and wasps taking advantage of the millions of blossoms coming into full nectar-bearing, and they were knocking them off by the handful. A steady shower of pale blossoms landed beneath the trees, making a wintry scene till the wind blew them away to make drifts against any upright surface. Nature’s abundance is astounding. Who knows—maybe one of the mature seeds from one of the seven trees may become a tree some day, but most likely that won’t come to pass. But that’s okay; Nature made a lot of fat bees instead.

A bloomin’ good day

Hilary sent some iPhone pictures she took of Ben in a field of flowers they found on their way back to Death Valley. Amazing how a desert can bloom so suddenly.

Outside our kitchen window is a large apricot tree. It was planted maybe 30 years ago, and every year it fills with the most brilliant blossoms. Unfortunately, there are no other apricot trees within flying range of the average honeybee, so we get maybe six apricots a year if we’re lucky. If we got another apricot tree, we’re told, we’d get tons of apricots from the big one. Worth considering, but then it’s a whole ’nother tree to irrigate through the hot summers.

I’ll think about it.

Clever bird

I just saw something remarkable, I think. A little brown sparrow-like bird flew out onto a sandy area where the ground temperature had to be hideous, being the hottest part of the day. It landed and hunkered down and dug itself into the fine dirt and just sat there. At first it looked like it was going to take a dust bath, but it didn’t move. It stayed there for probably three minutes. That would cook any living thing in that time! Aha! That’s what it’s doing—cooking any parasites on its hot little body! That’s what some honeybees do to the killer wasps that attack their hives; the bees swarm onto the wasp several bees deep and jiggle their wings to create heat that kills the wasp.

It looks like we haven’t finished learning from the birds and the bees.