Great photos! And, boy, do the bees ever love that one, and "Darlow's Enigma". Worth growing just for the bees, never mind the elegance and scent of the flowers.

OH, YES!!!!!!

And 'Fourth of July', and 'Belle Story' -- which makes me take even more photos of them.

Oh, that’s wonderful! Determined, hard working bees sure can stick a landing. Thank you for supplying their pollen, Jeri (and Catspa)! The downpours have hindered my bee spotting this year. Usually my daughter and I count the varieties of pollinators in the garden. If I had an extra house to eat, I’d surely grow SGMC for the bees alone and enjoy the bonus of blooms and scent. Thank you for sharing the delightful photos! Carol

Belle Story should be more widely grown! It is a really good rose here, too, and the bees do love it! It’s wonderful that your garden is supplying so much pollen for those deserving little marvels. I grow sage, lavender and lemon balm for the honey bees as much as my own pleasure. The bumblers love my passion flower blooms and are big enough and powerful enough to pry open the folding blooms.

Honey bee on sage.

The bees really go for my single and semi double OGRs like Rosa alba ’Semi Plena’, the ‘Apothecary’s Rose’ and ‘Rosa Mundi’. I have a single rose created by Kim Rupert called ‘DLFED2’ which the bees enjoy along with Robert Basye’s Rugosa rose ’Basye’s Purple’ and Pemberton’s Hybrid Musk rose ’Penelope’. Many generations of rose creations that are bee friendly! I also grow a couple of roses that are native to OR which I purchased at nearby Bosky Dell native plants nursery. The bees flock to them!

It's a good reason for having lots of weeds, as well as leaving shrubs unpruned so that they flower (because the buds haven't been cut back). Our garden is always buzzing, though I haven't looked systematically at what kinds of pollinators we have.

P.S. Lovely photos, Jeri.

A bee waiting impatiently for Duchesse de Brabant’s bloom to open. Bees of all sizes adore her! Her cupped petals open wide enough for little polliators.

I keep trying to capture images of the bees on my Penelope. They love her open, inviting blooms! I love her fragrance wafting in the garden. Maybe the bees do, too. Every time I try to reach up and get a shot, the bees move higher and the photo blurrs. The sun is shining this week, so I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, here’s a bumbler enthusiastically enjoying the sage blossoms.

And a full pollen dunk with a bee butt sticking out of the bloom.

Nice to have this additional criterion for selecting roses

I thought it might be fun to see an insect that seldom gets its due pollination credit—a beetle. This one is likely a blister beetle who is loving the pollen in Marie Pavie. I hope my daughter and I will have some leather wing sightings, too.

Do they eat while pollinating?

Here's another busy bee -- This time, in 'Lady Ann Kidwell.' There really is pollen in there, and this busybody found it.

Beetles do eat the pollen, but they also gets lots of pollen on their bodies and pass it along as they go. They are a bit sloppy. As long as there is balance in my garden, I don’t worry about losing a few blooms to insects. Heck, I plant things for butterfly larva. 😊 And honestly, I didn’t see much damage from that little beetle. We get all kinds of interesting critters in the garden. Some give me pause, like the swarm of variegated carpet beetles that dined on my cow parsnip pollen one year. I know they are buzzing around all over the outside world, which is where I want them to remain, but still…carpet beetles. If you look closely in the flowing photos, you can see at least 10 on the blooms below. My daughter and I are really enjoying your rose and bee photos! Carol

My daughter and I also do ”ant checks” on the peonies. Here are some little critters helping Festiva Maxima open its tightly packed buds.

ANTS!!! We have multiple sorts of ants. A plague of those tiny Brazilian ants that infests the entire neighborhood, if not the entire City. And then, there are larger ants which I do find on plants, from time to time.

Like this guy, investigating a Plumeria . . .

Those tiny ants must have constructed connected, underground passages all across the contiguous US! Little ant interstates. Every once in awhile, they explode all over the sidewalk like a pile of coffee grounds!

Best description ever!

Folks here on the Lane have conversations about things they've used to discourage them. Cinnamon. White vinegar . . .

"Little ant interstates . . . " ROTFLMAO!

My daughter and I did a garden pollinator search in the first day of PNW sunshine in a long time. We missed a good bee shot on R alba Semi Plena (too blurred) but caught this busy bumbler on the purple linaria: first collecting pollen and then taking off to find fresh pollen elsewhere.

We just don't see the bumblers these days. I don't know . . . Maybe it's too dry for them here? I'm grateful that honeybees live in the neighbor's retaining wall, so they're always around.,

@jerijen Maybe bumbler absence is one more ”bonus” of climate change? Grrr. Our bees were late this year, likely due to torrential rain. We don’t see as many honey bees as we used to but fortunately still see quite a few. I know there are urban bee keepers in PDX, and I have a bit of an urban farmer friend in the neighborhood who successfully relocated a hive to her large lot from a nearby church/preschool. Some of our garden honey bees might be hers! I do love seeing native bumblers. It’s hard for us to discriminate between the various bumbler types in our area, but sometimes my daughter and I can spot the extra “rusty” coloring, etc. The mini bees and other tiny pollinators are hard for us to photograph and hard for my blurry eyes to see, but we gets lots of those, too.