Yesterday morning at half light you could hear the bees from my back door that were working my dragon fruit flowers. Roughly about 20-30 flowers. The bees were going mental on them for a couple of hours until the flowers folded over, as they do.
There wasn’t one flower due to open last night. Hence, no flowers this morning. At half light this morning I went out to check the rat trap, only to hear a much louder bee noise coming from the dragon fruits. It was hundreds of bees looking for more dragon fruit flowers to work.
I guess it didn’t take long for them to move on to find something else.
I have all these flowering basils everywhere in my garden now- a lot in pots. I’ve been moving them around out of the full sun during the last heatwave we had. I noticed the bees would return to where the plants had been before quickly finding where they now were. They would visit a site for a few days - perhaps hoping the basil would re-appear.
I was wondering about these basils- as they seem to be an absolute favorite of the bees- they flower constantly and bees work them all day. On a small bush there are always a few bees- it seems that the basil flowers give an almost constant flow of nectar- and the bees also get a small amount of orange pollen off them.
then I read the following which says that these perennial basils are one of the most visited plants there is for bees:
Hi Jack, chances are, if you put a different flowering species in amongst the basil flowers, the bees will ignore it. I found that on my back verandah once. The bees were cleaning up some honey, when all of a sudden I put something out with a different flavor, the bees ignored it. I’m sure they went for it eventually.
I’ve seen the bees cleaning up honey, only to abandon it mid-way. The scouts must have found something more exciting.