Here's Ivy

Down at the creek there's a bit of garden wall covered with ivy which faces due South, and is always the first to flower. This gloriously sunny morning it has opened up, discreetly as always. For a human it's virtually impossible to tell by sight or smell whether the flowers are open or not and I'd have passed by without noticing, but the whole plant was alive with bees, hundreds of them, some with their pollen sacs so yellow and swollen they could hardly fly, but still eagerly collecting more. Ivy is the single most attractive flower to bees and butterflies I know, and it does it all with tiny pale green florets. Maybe the fact that there's not a lot of competition and they are all keen to stock up for the cold times ahead is enough, maybe ivy seen from a bee's point of view is brighter than it appears to us.