I wait all summer for this time, so I can finally see my Sweet Autumn Clematis (C. paniculata, also known as C. terniflora), bloom. I have the vine growing up from below the deck rails and it covers it all with a mass of glossy green leaves and then in late summer(early September--now!) the small white, sweetly fragrant blossoms open up.
The whole thing is a bee magnet, and I tried to capture some of the activity with a short video. These bees are frantically busy--hardly stopping(and hard to capture on camera), they moved around so quickly. I am sure they know they don't have much time left and want to make honey while the late summer sun shines. I only was able to focus in on two of the different bees in the video recording, but there were at least a dozen bees swarming all over and even deep within the tangled growth of my clematis vine.
Of course, as I was getting my face in close--almost into that mass of flowers and bees, to try to get the best shot possible, I did remember that the three times I have ever been stung by a bee was in the month of September (sat on one in the grass one time--ouch!).
17 comments:
I know just how that bee feels trying to cover all of those beautiful blossoms before the season ends. Nice video with great sound. Beautiful vine. I didn't know there were fall flowering clematis. ♥Rosemary
Your mosaic is very pretty. The video does have really good sound of the bees working their magic.
Very Animal Planet/Discovery channel video!! One can hear the buzzing! :-o And such pretty flowers :-) I have tons of bees in my back patio year round. They have their beehive inside a patio wall!! The wall is really ugly, but we haven't done anything to it for years to avoid hurting the bees and damaging their home. Maybe I should take pictures and share them...even perhaps a video...
Great post! and lovely vine.
Ah, I want this clematis for sure!!! Lovely, lovely, and I LOVE the clip; it feels like summer all over again.;))
Here it feels more and more like the summer is over for sure...
xoxo
PS: My verification word today;
clever
He he, very nice video Tina, I can almost smell the plant. Bees are such lovely creatures and so important to the human race. They need to be protected.
They are very busy, indeed!! Right now it is the wasps that are crazy around our house. They love our pine tree out front, for some reason. They are getting really dumb, too, like they always do this time of year. They fly right in your face...for no apparent reason. Anyway, we have 2 nests we are trying to get rid of around our house, but I think it is a Calgary problem. They are taking over!! AHHH!!!
I haven't heard of an autumn-blooming clematis. I must look for one for next spring. We have three spring blooming ones but they don't do very well. Maybe I'll have better luck with the autumn one.
good video and beautiful flowers. yes, getting stung is not fun. they were probably too busy with work to notice you!
What a fun post! I loved hearing the buzzing. I have been stung only once about 30 years ago as a child and still have the scar. I can remember having a bad reaction to it. Fingers crossed no more!(I got stung walking past a cake shop in Torquay, England)
On the island of Skiathos, there are swarms of bees throughout the summer season. I visited Skiathos in early August 2005 and really loved the island and its bees! There were bees EVERYWHERE : at the hotel during breakfast they'd sit on my toast. I remember one of them ..or maybe more? - leaving honey on my toast!! Of course I ate it. Bees are the cleanest insects ever but when on holiday they can sometimes be annoying. There were bees on the beach (Koukounaries Beach) as well! Fortunately, I wasn't stung!
Hey Tina!
I hope all is well with you, I have not heard from you in a long time! Things are okay for me. I wish fall was like fall up in New England, our leaves are just falling and we are still getting lots of rain.
~Rosemary,
I know you had been busy as a bee. I hope you have been able to stop buzzing by now, and able to sit back and relax with WEbster a little.
~Thanks, JarieLyn,
I go to a site called "Big Huge Labs" to create the photo videos.
~Claudia,
I know--I was happy that the sound of the buzzing came through okay in the little video. Sometimes, the sound of the wind-even a light breeze-seems to drown everything else out.
~Zuzana,
This was the clematis that I thought for sure had died over the winter--it was so late in poking up out of the ground. But I should have more faith in it--for the last nine years(it was a house warming gift from a friend)it has always gorown so huge over the summer and then bloomed right on time just as September began.
..don't you just love it when the verification word turns out to be something that is an actual word?! :-)
~~Arty,
I wish you could smell the flowers--so sweet! I agree about the need to protect bees. There has been distressing news about the mysterious collapse of bee colonies here in North America, so I do feel happy when I see them in my own garden.
~~Amanda,
Yikes! about the wasps! I have to say, that as the fall continues, the regular bees around here become more sluggish and more annoying, too(which is probably why I have always had bee stings at this time of year). I hope you can safely do away with those wasp nests.
~~Sandra,
I don't know if this clematis could do well a little further north, but I do know that it is an easy-care plant and doesn't even require as much sun as the summer-blooming ones do.
~~Doreen,
Thanks for visiting! I know--I kind of felt I had nothing to worry about from those bees, becasue of their intense focus on what they were doing.
~~Clare,
Well then, I certainly hopoe you won't ever get stung by a bee again, either!(just in case, maybe you should have one of those EpiPens on hand if you or your daughter were ever stung by a bee).
Other than the bee sting part, the image of you walking "by a cake shop in Torquay" sounds so nice and uberEnglish in a Daphne DuMaurier sort of way. :-)
~Anastasia,
I think I might have found the multitude of bees on Skiathos more than a little annoying if I were to stay there. Interesting about all the bees--seems to me, once you wrote about a place in Greece(or Cyprus?) that was famous for masses of butterflies?
~Hey RoseAnn,
So nice to hear from you--I "okay" isn't the worst , but I do know I have to catch up with your news at your blog. We have had some almost tropical(Florida) weather the last few days, but soon it'll get back to feeling like fall(and apple picking time!)
That's right, Tina. That was on the island of Rhodes in Greece and the lovely valley of butterflies. There you can see thousands of butterflies of the Callimorpha family from July to September.
I think there's one of these that I walk by with the dogs each day...I thought about taking a picture today but OMG 1000s of bees and I just walked away
Wise move, Janet...just
step a-w-a-y from the bees. ;-)
I saw masses of these vines all over on a walk down by the ocean Sunday--don't know if they naturally grow wild or they just seeded themselves from people's gardens a long time ago and spread. It was a gorgeous sight--they were literally climbing up tall trees(with loads f bees on them) and you could smell the blooms before you even saw the bushes/vines.
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