John, What a pretty sigh!!

Both the butterflies and bees and the flowers...

This is what I was talking about in the other post

I want to grow the "raspberry wine" monarda...I am sure all the monardas are pretty... Remind me to request you in fall swap for the echinacea and monarda.. or spring swap, whenever it is available.

Or whenever you are whacking it down... :-).

John,

What great pictures! I'm jealous, you have a great camera. I think I will save up and buy one for myself for christmas. LOL I was looking at Sam's Club yesterday.

I use the automatic setting on mine because I figure it is smarter than me, since it knows all about those f-stops, etc. My husband tries to explain to me but it makes my eyes cross.

Love those pollinators! They bring an extra dimension of life and interest to a garden, I think.

Black form of female tiger swallowtail on Lantana camara 'Miss Huff' (available for special trades at the fall Raleigh Swap - swallowtail not included).

" Swallowtail not included" hehe..

Actias luna - not a pollinator at all (adults don't feed), but otherwise fits well in this thread about cool-looking insects. Adults live no longer than one week, hence are rarely observed although relatively common. Wingspan about 4 in.

That is an awesome click!! The luna moth looks so much like leaves and a twig!! Thanks Casa lester!! for posting !

Just in time!! to talk on Pollinators.. Mine are mostly bees, wasps..

I use marigold in my vegetable garden for bringing them in. I have started the sunflowers ( thanks fall swap)... crossing fingers.

Our Aesculus parviflora is adding volume and starting to bloom nicely, and as a native plant it attracts a lot of pollinators.

The problem is that most of these pollinators appear to be carpenter bees.

The shrub was discovered belatedly by swallowtails - when the flowers were already expiring - and a few showed up.

But they were still crowded out by carpenter bees, with whom they had to share.

So here is our moral dilemma: as much as we want to support native pollinators, we don't want to encourage carpenter bees in the neighborhood and if we were to stand by with a vacuum cleaner, we could pick up 10-20 carpenter bees in 10 min.

What does the collective wisdom of the gardening community recommend?

While there are a number of species of black swallowtails, a closer examination of the black butterflies in our area reveals that most of them are not from any of those black species, in particular Papilio polyxenes, Eastern Black Swallowtail, but are indeed a black female form (morph) of the popular Papilio glaucus, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (seen above in our post from Sep 6, 2015). However, the former must definitely be present here as we just discovered a whole colony of their caterpillars devouring our small shrub of Ruta graveolens:

Took this series over about a two week period at the end of last month, on one of my agaves.

We were just talking with Vlad about hummingbird moths and how they like Cleome flowers and this evening we had a wonderful spectacle of two of them feeding on Hedychium coronarium. They are not easy to capture in photos after dusk, but are visible with flash: