I’ve had two fun encounters in my gardens this week: one involving my bee house, and one involving a butterfly.

My bee house is being occupied!

I noticed activity in my solitary bee house this weekend. One was a leaf cutter bee (I couldn’t get a picture of it), and the other was a wasp. I know many people are afraid of wasps, but this solitary wasp is a good one for gardeners: Isodontia auripes, also known as the brown-legged grass-carrying wasp. In the picture you can see that it is carrying some grass that it uses to plug the entrance to its nest cavity.

Brown-legged grass-carrying wasp using grass to plug a nest cavity

Plant host plants, and they will come…

My second encounter was with a butterfly I have been hoping to see ever since I started photographing butterflies years ago. It still astounds me how I can plant a host plant for a species of butterfly, and then that butterfly magically appears in my yard. It happens so often that it shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it does.

Planting white wild indigo

And like magic, there it was, a few months later, nectaring on my slender mountain mint.

A wild indigo duskywing, at last