Firstly, I am beyond thrilled that author Sharon Lovejoy stopped by to visit my blog, and commented on the Sunflower House post. She has written a book called Sunflower Houses, and is the author of one of the greatest books on gardening with kids: ROOTS, SHOOTS, BUCKETS &BOOTS. We've enjoyed this book as a family, and it contains all kinds of fun and whimsical gardening projects to do with your kids. It looks like she has a whole lot of other great books out that I'll need to check out as well!Also check out The Great Sunflower Project, which will send you free sunflower seeds in return for your help in counting bees. Since bees are not only important pollinators but also struggling right now with various environmental interferences and the Colony Collapse Disorder, anything we can do to help them out (like planting beneficial flowers and tracking them) is a good thing. We've already signed up and gotten our bee-observer data sheets. The kids are excited to be helping keep an eye on our little pollinating friends.
Häagen-Dazs is also contributing to doing good things for honeybees, since many of their ingredients are honeybee dependent. So if you're looking for a good excuse to eat Häagen-Dazs ice cream, go visit their Help the Honeybees site
I also got a couple packages of Territorial Seed's Honey Bee Flower Mix seeds and I'm planting those all around the outside of our new vegetable garden space in the hopes of attracting even more bees to our garden area.
I was happy to note that my lavender is being visited regularly by good numbers of honeybees and these cute orange-bottomed bumblebees. We used to have a beekeeper in our neighborhood and once we saw a whole swarm that had left his hive come over our house. I figure they settled somewhere in the woods near us, so we probably have a good concentration of honeybees in the area, for which I'm very grateful!
