h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Beautiful, beautiful bird, with the same colors as my favorite butterfly.

http://www.gardenswithwings.com/butterfly/Eastern%20Tiger%20Swallowtail/index.html

There's so much beautiful color in this world.

Hello Paulh! Well that is a beautiful butterfly indeed! We don't have anyone that looks quite like that over here, but we do have our own species of swallowtail butterflies. I agree, there's immense beauty in the world! If only we can keep it all safe! Thanks very much!

Little by little, year by year, I'm building up the soil in my area, planting more flowering shrubs and herbacious plants, and giving native birds and pollinators something nice to feast on or build their nests with.

That's good work Paulh! Over here I also have quite a thriving ecosystem here in my garden. I'm amazed at the variety of insects that come to pollinate the flowers of my succulents: butterflies, bees (from the huge carpenter bees down to mini-bees less than half as long as honeybees), hoverflies and other flies, beetles, wasps, ants ...

I'm reading a book called "The bees in your neighborhood." Honey bees, while important, aren't the only ones pollinating.

Hello again! Over here I love the huge carpenter bees. Many people confuse them for fruit chafers. They nest singly in old wood, sometimes in wooden beams of houses. They love big and usually pinkish or purplish flowers, such as of many species in the pea family. I have seen them 'steal' nectar from flowers, bypassing the pollen by piercing the bottom of the flowers with their strong, sharp proboscises.

We also have here a kind of honeybee which is a bit smaller than the usual kind, and nests in holes in the ground. The San people loved digging them out for the honey. I wonder if it tastes the same as regular honeybee honey ...

We have ground-dwelling bees in North America, too. When I was a kid in the South, I always wondered what those things were in the yard:

http://entomology.cals.cornell.edu/extension/wild-pollinators/native-bees-your-backyard

Colletes bees are very common in wet woods and swampy areas of Massachusetts and Connecticut. They have nicknames like Plasterer Bees or Cellophane Bees. They're apt to specialize in specific types of flowers (Asters or Legumes), though a few species will happily visit pretty much any kind of flower. They can also bypass the pollen holders and drill holes into the nectar-containing parts of the plant

Thanks for the article Dmitri! Those look like cute and cool little bees. I'll check for bees on my flowers ... not much flowering in the garden right now but many of my aloes are making their preparations!

It's good to know you've a great diversity of bee types over there as well. Even the sneaky nectar-stealing ones!

A group that doesn't get enough love is flies. People tend to not like them, thinking of house flies, bluebottles, fruit flies and stinging/biting flies ... but there are many totally innocuous and even useful fly species. Over here, I love the hoverflies. Some of them have very long tongues and drink nectar while hovering in front of a flower like a hummingbird. I've seen several species over here. Their flying expertise is amazing. I've on a few occasions seen a couple of hoverflies do a kind of dance or display together. They'd hang motionless in the air while eying each other, then rapidly change position, hang motionless again, and go on like that for a good time, perfectly coordinating their movements together.

Flies are surprisingly useful for pollination in far-northern areas that are too cold for bees.

Do you folks ever see craneflies over there?

North America has 573 species of them.

That's not bad! We have about 250 species of them in South Africa. But do you actually see them often?

I'd have to be looking for them in order to see them, wouldn't I?

Not necessarily! Over here they come into the houses a lot and they're pretty conspicuous.