Dueling hummingbirds and sleeping bees

Unlike so many areas of the country, our summer here along Southern California's coast hasn't been particularly awful.   We haven't had any temperatures over 100F (yet anyway).  We haven't been flooded with rain (or had any rain at all for that matter but then that's a normal summer for us).  Still, the garden and the gardener are feeling at low ebb.  Under normal circumstances, I'd be hand-watering my garden a lot more but, presented with constant reminders of how dire our drought is, I'm doing very little of that.  Several of my roses look close to dead but, rather than provide them with emergency water rations, I'm seriously considering whether I should just replace them with succulents.  I'm trying not to overreact - there's always a chance we'll get something like "normal" rain this winter - but I don't think I can stand looking at their flowerless stems another year if we don't.

Luckily, even with bare spots and brown foliage seemingly everywhere, there's life in the garden, like the hummingbirds constantly dueling for territory.

I think the combatants were Allen's hummingbirds but I'm not positive of that ID

Rest breaks between battles were common but brief and on most occasions, by the time I focused the camera, the little guys back into the fray

Male or female they're always alert to intruders in the vicinity

Their focus in the front garden are Grevilleas 'Peaches & Cream' and 'Superb'.  'Superb' (shown here) is loaded with flowers year-round.

On the other end of the activity scale, I found bees sleeping in flowers early on one cool, damp morning when the marine layer was thick and persisted until noon.

Completely motionless in Zinnia 'Benary's Giant Purple'

This one fell for Zinnia 'Benary's Giant Carmine Rose'

I cut 2 stems of white Amaryllis belladonna for In a Vase on Monday's floral arrangement and discovered this one buried in the center of a flower.  As it was bedraggled anyway, I cut the flower and left it and its occupant on the patio table.

I was a little worried that the bees were dead when I first saw them and felt compelled to gently blow on them to check.  Two reacted but one did not; however, within an hour all had flown away.  Cute as they were, I'm afraid I like my bees as lively as my hummingbirds.

Bees drawn by a recently opened Magnolia grandiflora flower

All material © 2012-2022by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party