A few blocks from the house, on the route I usually walk to downtown Silver Spring and the yoga studio, there are sunflowers planted in front of one of the buildings. They're an unusual and somewhat unruly landscape plant, but they've been there year after year. I'd like to thank the person responsible, as they're a popular attraction for bumblebees. Almost every time I walk past, I see bees - morning, midday, or evening. Today there were a lot of bees when I passed in early afternoon. It's fall now, and the time for gathering pollen and getting ready for winter is growing short. As I usually do, I stopped to watch the bees for a while. Pollinators. They rely on the plants for food, just as the plants rely on them for reproduction. The co-evolution of plant and animal life is amazing. In one sense, neither the bees or the sunflowers are separate - neither can exist without the other. They can exist only in intimate and dependent relationship - a meta-organism of bumblebee-sunflower.
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