Late, Very Late, Summer Blooms

For the past five summers, I have been growing sunflowers in the front yard, right along the sidewalk for the enjoyment of everyone.

  

Including the bees. And then I count the bees for The Great Sunflower Project, a citizen science project aimed at studying bees and other pollinators.  And sadly, their decline. 

Participation in the project is not hard to do, takes very little time, and provides the investigators with buckets of data. I especially love the map showing all of the observation gardens. (Next year, you too could be a little colored circle on the map...)

But this year, nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. The bees were out and busy, but I couldn't get any sunflowers to show up. The seeds just wouldn't germinate. If they had, I could of blamed the lack of results on the hungry snails. Instead it had to be all my fault. Except... except for the one little, brave plantlet that could. And slowly, slowly did.

Until finally, on October 10th, it produced a blossom. And who is that perched on the lower left side of the flower? A most very patient bee.