Snail Mail and Rose Power

What a perfect day to visit the Renfrew Park Community Centre! The rooms in the centre are buzzing with human activity, while the roses outside are busy with bees, mining the pollen from the roses.

If you check out the climbing rose on the field house, you'll see it attracts a suite of pollinators, all playing a rose in ensuring each flower bears healthy fruit with many seeds. This is a large mining bee known as Andrena prunorum. She's go quite the pollen load on her hind legs! Roses don't produce nectar, so this flower is all about the pollen.

This is a turquoise sweat bee. You make also find these on buttercups and flowers in the aster family.

This is a syphid fly, a little bee mimic that lays eggs on the plant where her larvae will hatch and dine on aphids.

Wendy Oberlander invited seniors at the Renfrew Park Community Centre to create a hand-written letter that we would illustrate and send in the mail. We had some lovely encounters and conversations with some folks sending love through the post box.

We talked about roses, ice cream and moonlit journeys by air. It's touching how deeply the letter-writers cared about the loved ones they were corresponding with.

Wendy and I created little cartoons which they enclosed in their letters--achieving a different kind of cross-pollination! Wendy will be doing this letter-writing activity at the summer camp at the community centre too. So much fun!