Garden action

The other day I was musing on the ecosystem of the garden, but as I went out to take photos for you, I got a bit of a shock.

I'd been picking green vegetable bugs off the runner beans, which have been giving us free greens for many weeks now. I feed the nasty little bugs to the chickens, who get very excited whenever we go near the bean pyramids. Then, of course, they turn them into eggs.

Waiting impatiently for live prey.

The bees were buzzing around the flowers, which pleased me because in early summer I was despairing the lack of honey bees, only ever having seen bumblebees doing their busy work on our flowers. Now, with probably a hundred sunflowers blooming, not to mention the purple phacelia and many colours of cosmos, they are in heaven.

Phacelia

What shocked me was some nasty fighting among black and yellow fuzzy things. There was one big bully wasp, clearly chasing off the honey bees. He left the bumble bees alone. The honey bees just avoided the bully and went to another flower, but he was making life difficult and probably exhausting for them.

There's the wasp on a cosmos flower
- wider body, very narrow waist.

What a wild world it is out there in our back garden!