Sow There! May 16 Carpenter bees/digital camera
Like many gardeners, I’m pleased and proud when I have visitors to my little sanctuary.
Bonus if they do nice thing for my plants.
We were a little competitive after we saw my best friend next door have success with her hummingbird feeder. I felt compelled to buy my own and then brag about whose feeder was getting more traffic.
(Here's one of the dozen digital photos I took of our neighbor's dog Marnie. Marnie stayed at our house for a week and was in several photos shoots with the infamous rubber chicken).
We also bought one of those mesh bags filled with tiny seeds for the finches. We must have hung it in a bad location because that offering to nature has been virtually ignored.
However, something new and exciting has been buzzing around the yard with regular frequency.
Last summer I planted foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) in peat pots and slowly grew them over the winter in the windowsill.
Foxglove, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalis_purpurea, is poisonous. Rather than go into some deep murder mystery plot possibilities, I’ll just say that no part of the plant should be ingested by humans or animals.
Now the plants are as tall as a medium-sized professional basketball player.
Besides the obviously stately appearance of the plants, alarmingly huge black bees visit the yard at least once a day to dabble in their pollen.
I’m easily amused so I watched the bees, the bug equivalent of an Airbus, as they made the clockwise rounds of my small yard. As they hovered like a helicopter, they scratched at the drooping, glove-like petals of the foxglove and crawled completely inside.
They make quite a racket while inside, clawing and scratching.
After a Web search, I determined they must be carpenter bees, which come in the size big and the color black in this part of the world. Carpenter bees are so-called because they dig holes in wood to make their homes.
Leif, the soon-to-be-11-year-old next door, was a bit freaked out by them at first. But we learned that the big, bad boys are harmless unless you go out of your way to irk them.
Back on the digital pathway
After months of living without, a nice person returned our digital camera.
We bought the new gadget because taking film photos of our adventures with the rubber chicken had become cost-prohibitive.
Almost immediately after buying the digital camera, I became the terror of the neighborhood.
The Jan. 4 storms came and the camera was used to document the fallen trees, blown-over fences and munched cars.
Then the camera was used to document Leif’s first baseball practice.
Inevitably, the camera was out at barbecues. My best friend next door hates to have her photo taken, so now I have about 23 shots of her raising her hand in front of her face, often in a well-known obscene gesture.
Yes, we did also manage to take a bazillion pictures of the rubber chicken, some of which can be viewed in other places on my Web blog.
Needless to say, after a short period of time there were hundreds of pictures on the digital camera.
Then, one day the digital camera disappeared.
At first I thought it was a prank. Maybe Tommy had hidden it because he was tired of those surprising flashes when he was taking a shower. Or maybe my best friend hid it so she could erase all the photos of her upraised hand.
But after a while I realized it was really gone.
As it turns out, someone found the camera. Apparently this night manager at a grocery store had found it and tried to find its owner.
Apparently he had looked at our pictures and recognized Tommy’s co-worker in the photos one time when I was snapping 18 shots of the two of them having a meaningful conversation in the alley.
This brings up a couple of important points. First, note to self, always make sure any photo you have on your digital camera is something you wouldn’t mind having viewed by the night manager at a grocery store.
Second, I really don’t want to hear any more comments about how I take too many digital photos. If it hadn’t been for me taking all those unnecessary photos, we would have never gotten the camera back.
Another pleasant outcome of the return of the camera is the before and after.
Two months ago I took photos of a big mud pit in the backyard. Now we have planted a new lawn and I can see the impact of all Tommy’s hard work.
(Yet another needless photo of the rubber chicken. This one was snapped somewhere along I-5, where the rubber chicken was the star in a short documentary about how rubber animals fare on road trips).
NOTE:
A reader named Cynthia wrote in with some useful advice.
She suggested to get a tag normally used for identification of pets and engrave it with your name and phone number then attach it to the camera.