Chances are, unless you're Australian, you wouldn't have heard of a blue banded bee.

Everyone imagines the honey bee as the most important pollinator, but truth be told, if we're attracting such creatures to the garden, you should be getting excited if a blue banded bee arrives. Amegilla cingulate has a unique buzz pollination method, vibrating flowers to release pollen that other bees can't access. So they're great at shaking out tightly held pollen from tomatoes and eggplatns, as well as vibrant banksia and grevillea (Aussie natives).

As much as I'd love you to see a blue banded bee, they're hard to photograph - damn things won't sit still. Whole bushes will vibrate with them and they make such a loud sound. I usually sqqqqueal when I spot them - it's a blue banded beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

^{Image by Emily Wade on Unsplash}

The thing is, once you start a garden and start being curious about nature, you start getting stupid excited over biodiversity. You start absorbing the fact that gardens don't just have a 'bird', a 'worm', a 'bee', but that a really good garden has biodiversity - and that you have to encourage a whole ecosystem. Even mosquitos have a place in that web.

This may be controversial, and yes, I'm probably reprimanding you, but if you're using chemical sprays like glycophospates to kill weeds, you're an asshole that's responsible for decling biodiversity. But I think on the whole, gardeners are on the front line of biodiverse landscapes - without backyard gardens, I wonder whether we'd have any pollinators visit the neighbourhood. Where I live, there's around 2,000 different pollinators, many of which I don't know the name of and probably haven't spotted.

Hive Garden's challenge this week asked us to talk about wildlife, and it's got me thinking about how much I don't know about insects, save the one or two bees I recongise. I have actual honey bees in my garden, though I'm terrible at tending to them. This post reminds me to contact my local bee keeper, who said he'd help me out.

If I was a more pedantic pollinator attracting gardener, I'd plant more specifically for different buzz babies, but I'm not. Instead I let everything go to flower just in case, and I plant a heap of different herbs that have various types of flowers. The more diversity I have in plant life, the more diversity I figure I'll have in wild life like blue banded bees.

Because if they're buzzing, so am I.