Thanks, but wie Sie offensichtlich gesehen haben, dies ist keine Website auf der man solche Spiele spielen kann. Danke schön!

Thank you!

I am going to watch out for brussels. I’ll appreciate
if you continue this in future. Many people will be benefited from
your writing. Cheers!

Thank you! Could you clarify your question, please? I’m not sure what you’re asking me to recommend.

Any sure?

Hi Greta! I think that the question you’re asking is a very important one – as well as very complex. I don’t have a good answer, but I wonder about this as well. One interesting point of reference is a 2009 article by Vince Tepedino, Brosi Bradley, and Terry Griswold. Making much more thorough observations than I have of bees visiting three non-native plants and common natives blooming at the same time in a park in Utah, they argued that their results suggest that, at least in that system, the non-native plants are most likely boosting overall bee carrying capacity rather than out-competing native plants for pollinator attention.

Based on the patterns we saw in the field last week (i.e. Bombus rufocinctus and B. bifarius only seen visiting the non-native Russian knapweed), I would very tentatively lean towards a similar interpretation in this case, that in this system at this time of year, the presence of Russian knapweed is facilitating overall bumblebee abundance rather than outcompeting native plants for pollinator attention. More comprehensive bumblebee observations in this community over a longer time span would probably give us a more complete picture… and maybe someone could design a study comparing knapweed-removal plots with control plots to more robustly approach this question. (Though I would think that the presence of many variables would make that hard, i.e. bumblebees are mobile, surrounding habitat is non-homogeneous, etc.)

Over the past years on this site, I have documented Russian knapweed blooming from mid-July through the end of September. Here’s a partial list of relatively open/accessible native plants blooming during this window. It would be interesting to watch these species closely for bumblebee visitation.

From relatively early to relatively late-season beginning of bloom period [this is from data collected patchily and opportunistically, 2017-2021]:
– Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)
– Rocky mountain beeplant (Cleome serrulata)
– Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium)
– White clematis (Clematis ligusticifolia)
– Cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata)
– Giant goldenrod (Solidago gigantea)
– Wild mint (Mentha arvensis)
– Blue vervain (Verbena hastata)
– Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis)
– Nuttall’s sunflower (Helianthus nuttallii)
– Dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata)
– Rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa)
– Common sunflower (Helianthus annuus)
– Curlycup gumweed (Grindelia squarrosa)
– Broom snakeweed (Gutierrezia sarothrae)
– Western aster (Symphyotrichum ascendens)

Here are these charts of flowering phenology for Russian knapweed vs. the species I listed.

Thank you! I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying it.

I notice that you made this identical comment on all of my other blog posts. I removed those duplicates, since they say the same thing as this one. If you have a non-specific comment like this, please limit yourself to leaving it on one of the posts. Thanks! 🙂