Well, here is a question to distract you from wars and humanity’s repetitive stupidity. A question about bees and wasps.

One day last week, I ventured into the garden to enjoy the special molten light that comes only for a few minutes every evening when we have had a beautiful sunny summer day.

I say ventured because despite the evening’s enchanting light it takes an act of courage to enter the garden at that hour.

I have a small pond that for some years was populated with fat and happy fish that gobbled all the mosquito larvae and kept my place mosquito free. The few the fish missed grew and flew only to be inhaled by the dozens of swifts and swallows that swoop and swirl around in the gloaming, the golden moment before real dusk and then darkness descends.

Early this year a heron found my pond. He sat on the garage roof for several consecutive days and studied the pond for hours. A few days later fifteen beautiful floaty finned koi were gone and just little tiddlers remained. The tiddlers grew on their diet of skeeter larvae and then the heron ate them too. Having no fish left, the garden in the evening is now mosquito hell. The swifts and swallows alone can’t keep up. If I go out in the evening I am eaten alive by mosquitos. I could spray the garden but I don’t. And the reason I don’t is because of what I found on my lavender bushes when I ventured out a few evenings ago covered in “Off”.

My lavender bushes were alive with bumble bees so big they bent the lavender heads to the ground, small buzzy bumble bees, fuzzy brown honey bees, little grey bees, giant yellow jackets, tiny yellow jackets, white cabbage butterflies, blue skippers, a bronze copper and, most interesting of all, a little hummingbird Hawk moth. The hornworm caterpillars that gardeners, including me, hate to see munching on their tomato plants morph into these Hawk moths, or Sphinx moths, each a type of amazing little hummingbird moth. They flit around at warp speed tapping the flowers with their elongated probiscus, afraid of no one, not even the enormous yellow jackets. They have big eyes, orange wings and black and white spotted tails. Little acrobats, they are wonderful to watch. If I sprayed, none of these winged lovelies would be there on the lavender.

I went out again the next evening to enjoy the buzzing and humming in the lavender and instead found both bees and yellow jackets, a few dozen of them, tightly attached to the lavender tips in a kind of torpor, like they’d all decided to sleep there for the night. I touched one of the big yellow jackets that seemed dead. It didn’t move. I cut off the blossom with the wasp still attached and dropped it into a glass jar. The wasp, angry as all get out, instantly came to life when he landed at the bottom of the jar and threatened me with his furious little face and wild wiggling legs. I shook him out of the jar and off he flew.

I’ve actually never seen a group of so many bees and wasps just “resting”. Sometimes they pause for a mini snooze during an active day, some old bees rest on flowers before returning to the hive, some seem to choose to die on flowers. But these guys weren’t dead. And the next morning they were all gone.

A mystery. One evening the lavender is a hive of activity the next evening all the wee winged creatures are asleep on top of it.

If any gardeners or entomologists here can explain this, or if anyone else has a theory about bees and wasps all resting together, so immobile they seem dead, I would love to hear it.
Here is a pic of the busy hummingbird Hawk moth.

Does anyone remember who was the person to first announce that there was a “list”?

So much time has passed I simply don’t remember, if I ever knew in the first place.

Maybe a “list” never existed?