Plumbago

Not much time for photography today - spent the morning finally washing the kitchen floor and tidying up - yes you guessed it - I had a visitor coming! Blipper Gilesey no less! We sauntered into the village to the new cafe and ate food as pretty as a picture and just as tasty! Lots of catching up done and all too soon she had to go back to Nibbler.
Once home I decided the Plumbago would make a nice photo - I have not repotted it in years and each year I cut it back and it looks like a bunch of dead stems - but then come the spring it begins to grow leaves so I water it again and Boom! Soon it's a monster - but a very beautiful one! As I was taking it's photo I heard a bee so tried to capture it, and noticed that instead of pushing its proboscis into the flower it was bumbling down the length of the flower - it didn't seem to be going for the sticky bits of green, and I couldn't see if it was making a hole through the flower to get to the nectar, but it might explain why the individual flowers drop so frequently! They are most annoying as being sticky they stick to everything - me, Fat Cat, other plants - I seem to spend my summer picking them off various things!
I did look up the sticky bits and found this:-

The flower calyx has glandular trichomes (hairs), which secrete a sticky mucilage that is capable of trapping and killing insects; it is unclear what the purpose of these trichomes is; protection from pollination by way of "crawlers" (ants and other insects that typically do not transfer pollen between individual plants), or possible protocarnivory.


Well I've never seen insects stuck to them and the bee certainly didn't get stuck - but it was already carrying mites poor thing. But I looked that up too and unless there are too many and the bee can't fly, they are harmless! The bee did get a shock when the weight of it on one flower made the flower and it fall - the flower hit the ground but halfway down the bee recovered itself and flew back up!