Bee-friendly plants series: Creeping Charlie

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Creeping Charlie. The first ten hits from Google are about how to kill “creeping charlie”. No! No! No! It’s a great bee plant. It’s a member of the mint family and apparently you can eat it, too. At our place it is abundant in our orchard and in shady parts of our lawn. Honeybees and bumble bees work it hard in the spring and early summer …another reason I’m pretty slack with the lawn mowing. Interesting factoid: Creeping charlie flowers don’t all have the same amount of nectar reward. Some flowers can have forty times more sugar than others. The bees work all the flowers and they get pollinated but the plant saves resources by only giving an occasional payout jackpot. Kind of makes me think of Timmy’s rollup the rim … “please play again” … and we do, and so do the bees.