Western honey bee
Honey is made on this property. Worth being straight about the bee that makes it: it is not from here.
In brief
Apis mellifera, Apidae, order Hymenoptera.
- Resident, kept and wild
- Introduced. Native to Europe, western Asia and Africa
- Eats nectar and pollen
Where it lives
Native to Europe, western Asia and Africa, and now on every continent except Antarctica. It arrived in North America with European colonists in the 1600s.
When you see it
On the wing whenever anything is in flower, which here is most of the year.
What it eats
Nectar and pollen. The orange lump on the hind leg in the photograph is a pollen basket, packed for the trip home.
Here
Photographed working golden fleece on September 7, 2025. The honest note: the native bees were doing this job first, and still do most of it. Bumblebees are the ones that can buzz-pollinate a shooting star, which a honey bee cannot.
By Yggdrasil Springs
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The first thing in flower here, and often the only thing. Pink urns in January, on a shrub that peels itself red.
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Chaparral currant
It flowers when nothing else does. That is the whole point of it, and it is why the hummingbirds stay.
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The Butte Fire made this plant's decade. It came up through the burn and it is now one of the commonest shrubs on the land.
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Deer brush
Cream plumes over the whole hillside in April, and seed that can wait decades in the ground for the next fire.
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Yerba santa
Sticky, resinous, and named holy herb by people who used it for a cough long before anyone wrote it down.
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Mountain misery
Ankle-deep fern-like mats under the oaks, white rose flowers, and a resin that sticks to everything that walks through it.
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Twining snakelily
The only snakelily that climbs. It uses the shrub next to it to get its flowers up into the light.
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Shooting star
Swept-back magenta petals on a bare stalk. The shape is not decoration: it is a set of instructions for a bumblebee.
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Woolly Indian paintbrush
The red is not petals, and the plant is not feeding itself. Both facts take some getting used to.
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Yellow evening primrose
Opens at dusk, worked by moths in the dark, and orange and collapsed by the next afternoon.
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California everlasting
Papery whether it is flowering or setting seed, which makes it the hardest plant here to date honestly.
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Toyon
White flowers in June that nobody looks at, and red berries in December that everybody does.
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One tree that looks like two, and an acorn cup that settles the argument in about ten seconds.
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Silver bush lupine
The tall lupine: a woody, silver-leaved shrub to about 150 cm, holding violet spikes above the burn.
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Sky lupine
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Black oak
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California buckeye
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Ponderosa pine
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Incense cedar
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Western bracken fern
One of the most widely distributed plants on earth, and it stands green in dry grass in August.
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Common mullein
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Bull thistle
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Himalayan blackberry
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Northern California black walnut
Native to California, and almost certainly standing here because somebody planted it.
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Sierra iris
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White morning glory
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