When I stopped by Canadian Tire recently, I checked out their garden section. Along with the usual fall selection of mums in bright autumnal colours, they had some nice agastache plants. I passed up the mums, but brought home a few pots of the agastache.
It’s a variety called Blue Fortune Giant Hyssop, fairly commonly available at garden centres. I’ve grown it before in past gardens and found it to be a rather short-lived perennial, but it has several charms. It’s purple flowers are pretty to look at, and it is a bee magnet. Bumblebees love it. Absolutely adore it. While bees visit many flowers in the garden and surrounding fields, nothing attracts bumblebees like agastache. All day, every day, you can wander out into the garden and see the agastache spires dotted with bumblebees.
The visitors seem to be mostly of two species. I believe the smaller bumblebee on the left to be a Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens), while the larger bee on the right is an Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica). The fuzzy hairs that give bumble bees a kinder, gentler look than other bees, provide them with insulation that allows them to fly at cooler temperatures than most pollinators.
Agastache is a member of the Lamiaceae family, which also includes mints and lavender. Blue Fortune is a hybrid cross of A. rugosa and A. foeniculum. The former is native to Asia, where hyssop has long been used as a herbal remedy, reputed to be helpful with fevers, upset stomachs and cold symptoms. A. foeniculum is native to North America from northern Canada south to Colorado and Wisconsin. For more about agastache for the garden, check out this Fine Gardening site.
Willow House Chronicles 
Up close the individual flowers look a lot like viper’s bugloss. So much so that I had to look ’em up to see if they are in the same genus (they aren’t).
It does look somewhat like viper’s bugloss. A little more refined. I think I’ll look for some of the other varieties next year. I added a link to the Fine Gardening site on agastache.
[…] an account of bees at the agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ Giant Hyssop, follow this link to Bee Happy. ‘Heatwave’ is a little different from ‘Blue Fortune’, having long, tubular […]
Hey,
Love the photos- I am hoping I might use one in a presentation about bumble bee foraging. I’m certain you don’t have any Xylocopa pictured here. My guess for the bee on the right in the second picture is a male Bombus griseocollis. Carpenter Bees (Xylocopa) basically have black, shiny abdomens, while Bumble Bees (Bombus) usually have hairy abdomens, as you note. B. griseocollis females generally have two stripes on their abdomen (the first two segments, or terga, are yellow) whereas B. impatiens always have only one. Males are usually much yellower and fuzzier. Their faces are easy to distinguish from females’ based on a yellow dot between their eyes (see the guys on the left in pics 3 and 4); griseocollis males also have big, bulging, bug eyes.
For Bee ID, check out discoverlife:
http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?guide=Bombus
Thanks!
Hello Mike! Thanks for the I.D. information. Next summer, I’ll take a closer look. I love watching the bees that visit my garden. Actually, the most popular flower I have isn’t agastache, but Dark Mullein, or Verbascum nigrum. When in full flower, it is gorgeous, and attracts a frenzy of bees. I have tried to capture the amazing buzzing that emanates from the plants every morning, but my camera is just not up to the job. You are welcome to use any photos that would be helpful to you. Thanks for the web link. Sheri