if it's a streak of gray, you don't wash it away.

You welcome it. 

The gray hairstreak butterfly (Strymon melinus) is common on our sedum, a good fall plant for pollinators, including butterflies, honey bees, sweat bees and syrphid flies, aka hover flies or flower flies.

Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, says on his website that the gray hairstreak visits "an immense variety of flowers, both wild and cultivated.  They are particularly addicted to Heliotrope and white-flowered Apiaceae."

Apiaceae? That's the carrot family, which includes not only carrots but parsley, celery, Queen Ann'es lace, parsnip, cilantro, hemlock, fennel and anise. Heliotropes, which commonly yield pink-purple flowers, are good for graystreaks, but not good for horses. It's toxic and can induce liver failure, according to the ASPCA's Animal Poison Control Center.

You can't be too careful out there.

Call it serendipity.

Call it a prize from the sky.

Frankly, it's not every day that a newly emerged Gulf Fritillary butterfly, Agraulis vanillae,  lands at your feet. It crawled from its chrysalis, hinged to a eight-foot high tree limb near our passionflower vines (Passiflora), and fell, quite unceremoniously,  on a bed of wood chips.

Right where I was standing.

At first I thought a scrub jay or an European paper wasp (which keep an attentive eye on the Gulf Frit population in our yard) had nailed it.

No. This was newly emerged. It looked like a plop of red, orange and silver paint, its body limp, its antennae crumbled, its wings still damp.

I lifted it gingerly and placed it on a Passiflora to dry off. Did it fly off in five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? No, it stayed for two hours. When scores of male adult butterflies ventured down to check its gender and then left, I figured it to be the same gender.

A boy butterfly.

If it were female, a male would have mated with her in minutes as one did several weeks ago when a female emerged from a chrysalis. (That, however, is not the only way you can tell gender! There are abdominal differences and males are more brightly colored, a deeper reddish-orange, than the females.)

Boy Butterfly leaned his head back, opened and stretched his wings, and finally, he took off, touching me on the shoulder as he floated by.

Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis  who monitors the butterfly population in the Central Valley, is glad to see the Gulf Frits making a comeback in this area. He writes on his website:

"this dazzling bit of the New World Tropics was introduced into southern California in the 19th Century--we don't know how--and was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908, though it seems to have become established there only in the 1950s. It can be quite common in the East and South Bay--particularly in Berkeley--and has been found breeding spontaneously as far inland as Fairfield where, however, it is not established. There are scattered records in the Central Valley and even up to Folsom, perhaps resulting from people breeding the species for amusement or to release at social occasions. According to Hal Michael, who grew up in South Sacramento, this species bred there in abundance on garden Passiflora in the early 1960s. It seems to have died out by the early 1970s, however. Intolerant of hard freezes, it still managed to survive the record cold snap of 1990 that largely exterminated the Buckeye regionally!"

As for Boy Butterfly, a loudly buzzing female Valley carpenter bee attempting to forage on a flower near his head, prompted his rather abrupt departure.

As summer nears its end, the honey bees are hungry.

That's why Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology advocates that we plant flowers for late summer and fall to help the bees. Often we think of spring as the season for planting bee plants, but mid- to late summer and fall is when they really need our help.

Malnutrition is one of the factors suspected in colony collapse disorder (CCD), the mysterious malardy in which adult bees abandon the hive, leaving behind the queen bee, immature brood and food stores. Other factors in the declining bee population include pesticides, pests, diseases and stress.

If you look around, you'll see bees foraging in Northern California on blanket flower (Gaillardia), sedum (family Crassulaceae) and late-blooming towers of jewels (Echium wildpretii).

And the lavenders, salvias (sages) and the mints.

Coming soon: the Neal Williams lab at the University of California, Davis, is compiling a list of bee plants that will be posted on the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.

Current resources? The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation features plant lists on its site. The UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab maintains a wealth of information about plants and pollinators on its site. There's even a Bee Smart app, offered free by the Pollinator Partnership, that will enable you to browse through about 1000 native plants.

Some of my favorite honey bee plants: the lavenders, the salvias, sunflowers, catmint, sedum, blanket flowers, oregano, artichoke, zinnias, cosmos, borage, bush germander, buckwheat, basil, ceanothus, coneflowers, seaside daisies, red hot poker, and of course, the tower of jewels, which, in height, towers over them all.

Today (Labor Day) began just like any other day.

And it ended just like any other day, except for the Labor Day celebrations that we humans plan.

For Nature's predators and prey that frequent our garden, however, it was an intertwining of life and death.

A western spotted orb weaver, Neoscona oaxacensis, spun a web on our tower of jewels, Echium wildpretii, and snagged, killed and wrapped a honey bee. Using the web as its lifeline, it tugged the bee into the shadows to eat it, undisturbed.

The tower of jewels, in bloom now for five months, looks like a tower of bees when the honey bees, syrphid flies, and carpenter bees share it. The plant is looking a little ragged now--it's going to seed--but it's still producing spectacular reddish-pink blossoms.

The spiders know where to spin their webs. They will be back tomorrow, as will the honey bees.