Observances on a Thursday

I walked outside to a cool (for us) morning.  Temperatures were in the low 60's and it felt GREAT!  Belle, our Great Pyrenees, seconded that motion.  With her long hair, she's ready for cooler weather.  She was alert and frisky and guarding her charge of cows, goats and chickens.  She doesn't guard the honeybees.  She says, "the heck with that."  They stung her before and whenever we work bees, Belles goes into hiding.  I don't blame her.

The Black Turtle Beans are blooming and putting on pods.  I'll let the beans ripen on the plant and I'll pick the dried pods and shell them for cooking.  We really like black beans.   A favorite simple meal of ours is to cook the black beans and refry them into a paste and then spread the refried black beans on a homemade flour tortilla, add some white cheese, fold in half and eat.  The blooms of the black beans are lavender-colored and pretty, attracting pollinators to the garden.  The black beans are more or less a bush bean, but in this case, they reached out and grabbed the cucumber trellis and they are taking off climbing it.

Here's something cool I saw in the garden.  I chased it and the brightly colored insect was moving fast.  It is a red velvet ant, but don't be deceived.  It is not an ant.  It is actually a wasp.  This one is a female since it doesn't have wings.  The males have wings.  I almost made the mistake of picking it up and boy, am I glad I didn't.  It's nickname is "Cow Killer" because of its painful sting, ranking as one of the worst stings on the sting pain index.  Don't pick these up!

One final insect I saw in the garden was this black bee pollinating the louffa gourd flowers.  The brightly-colored yellow flowers are prevalent in the back part of the garden where the louffa vines proliferate.  This is not a honeybee and it is not a bumblebee.  I was researching to see what it was and if I'm looking at it correctly, it is a black bee - a carpenter bee.

Well, well...  We wage war with the carpenter bees out at the barn.  They like to drill holes in the 2x4s that form up the rafters of the roof.  On both sides of the barn, we keep badminton rackets hanging on a nail - not to play badminton, but we've found that the rackets are great for popping carpenter bees.  We swing and pop them mid flight.  They fall to the ground stunned, and we run and stomp on them.  It's great fun.  We're easily entertained, as you can see.

I'm glad this bee is pollinating, but I don't want him drilling holes in our barn.  If he does and we catch him with the racket, this will be the last flower he sees.