Moving to a new place involves learning to live with different neighbors. When we moved to South Dakota we planted tulips in our yard. We like tulips. So do the deer. The deer ate the tops of the plants before they could flower. For the next 25 years we didn’t have tulips in our yard. We grew plenty of iris, which is another flower we love. And we grew a few marigolds as well. If you talk to the people who work in nurseries and other places that sell plants in South Dakota they are careful to use the term “deer resistant.” I don’t think anyone uses “deer proof.” Deer will sample plants and spit them out if they don’t like them. This is especially true of young fawns.

One of the neighbor mistakes I made in our South Dakota years was feeding a bit of cracked corn to the wild turkeys. My mother loved to watch the turkeys, but as she aged her eyesight wasn’t as clear as it once had been. I decided to put out a bit of cricked corn on our deck so that the turkeys would come up where she could easily view them through the patio door. It worked even better than expected. Not only did they come up onto the deck, but they came at the same time every morning, after mother was up and dressed and having a second cup of coffee. They climbed on the deck and on the deck railing and they clustered in clumps and fell over one another. They tried to get seed out of the bird feeders. They provided a bit of entertainment every day for mother. They also left a big mess on the deck that was a pain to clean. I only fed them a couple of times, but they came back every day for months. I guess they had gotten into stopping at our deck as part of their daily routine and just because there wasn’t food there today they thought maybe there would be food there tomorrow.

I’m learning a lesson about pollinators in our home here in Washington. I’ve become more observant of insects after becoming a bee keeper. The bees I tend (and occasionally steal honey from) don’t live at our house. The colonies are in hives at our son’s family farm a few miles down the road. Although it is possible for honey bees to forage as far away from the hive as our home, those bees have no reason to do so. There are plenty of blooming plants on the farm and they don’t have to travel to find nectar and pollen. Watching bees, including bees that are not domestic, has become a bit of a hobby with me. I listen for the buzzing and I look at the insects and try to discover their ways.

Another pollinator that I enjoy watching around here are hummingbirds. The tiny birds we see most commonly around our plants are Anna’s Hummingbirds. They are common in the Western part of our state and stay all year around here on the coast. This is the only place I have ever lived where we see humming birds in the winter. I’ve seen the tiny ones in the shrubs in our front yard when there is snow on the ground.

This spring I put up a hummingbird feeder in our back yard. I wanted to attract the birds so that I could observe them. It worked. We’ve had plenty more hummingbirds in our yard and I’ve been able to watch them, sometimes as closely as only three or four feet away. I’ve yet to get a good photograph, but I think that one is possible if I have enough patience.

However, hummingbirds aren’t the only creatures attracted by the feeder. Soon I noticed several different types of bees gathering the sweet water from the feeder. There were mason bees and bumble bees and several different types of wasps around the feeder all the time. I don’t think the insects discouraged the hummingbirds, but I wasn’t pleased with the number of insects it was attracting. We want the insects to pollinate our flowers and trees and don’t want to over supplement their feed so that they don’t bother going to the plants we want pollinated. I don’t know about mason bees or bumble bees, but honey bees only visit a single type of plant on each trip from the hive. They may visit several types of plants throughout the summer, but when they find a plant that has the nectar and pollen they like, they keep going back to the same plant over and over again. This makes them efficient pollinators since the plants want the pollen from their own type of plant. Dandelion pollen doesn’t help the lavender propagate. I didn’t want the bees to keep coming back to the feeder over and over again.

Furthermore, the feeder was attracting yellow jackets. Those creatures were’t attracted by the honey water as much as they were attracted by the other insects that came to the area around the feeder. Yellow jackets are carnivorous. They feed on other insects and bees. They don’t shy away from cannibalism, either, eating other yellow jackets. What got out attention is that they are attracted by picnic fare, eating fruits and the food that we eat. We eat out on our deck a lot, but lately the yellow jackets have forced us indoors several times. Our granddaughter got bit by a yellow jacket yesterday, but fortunately it wasn’t at our house. Yellow jackets can both sting and bite. Unlike honey bees they don’t lose their stinger and so it is difficult to know. They can also sting repeatedly and will do so with little provocation.

The humming bird feeder has come down and been put away. I’ll put it up after cold weather has forced the insects into hibernation. And next year I plan to take it back down before the insects are flying. I suppose that I could put up a wasp trap. They attract yellow jackets because the creatures feed off of the bees and other insects that also become entrapped, and are quite effective. But I don’t really want to kill the neighbor insects. I’m particularly reluctant to trap bumble bees and mason bees, which are important to our flowering plants.

I’ve got a lot to learn about living with our insect neighbors and I’m sure the lessons will continue.