Thank you, Shanna! I was interested to learn about the ladybug harvesting, as well. And yes, as far as pollinators, we can generally expect that the more native plants we have blooming on the landscape, the more of them we’ll support. (Especially for bees: it takes time for specialists to coevolve that are well-suited to develop on the particular pollen of a certain plant.) It’s very evident that some of our more recently introduced plants, such as leafy spurge and musk thistle, support lots of pollinators too. In these cases, I would *expect* that either these species are less picky about their choices of flowers for pollen and/or nectar (eg. generalist species, such as honeybees), or they could be specialists on a closely-related native plant.

In the case of leafy spurge, we do have a related, somewhat similar-looking native species, Euphorbia robusta. I haven’t seen this species yet, but I’m keeping my eyes open now – I would imagine we would see a similar diversity of pollinators on this native species, as well.