What’s at the end of the rainbow? A big tomato, that’s what.

The tops of the trees are in flames this evening. Fall sunsets make for spectacular evenings. Each season has its palette. Fall’s palette is that of the burning bush. Drop by drop, the autumn rains are washing away summer’s brilliant hues.

Picking beans this afternoon I stumbled on a harvestmen waiting for prey. Look at it closely, and you can see that it’s not a spider. It is in the order of arachnids known as opiliones. They are not venomous and they don’t spin webs. They have been around for 400 million years. They tend to be nocturnal and catch prey by ambushing them.

Seeing creatures like this harvestmen make me glad I’m not a small bug. Life would be one constant nightmare keeping an eye out for monsters like this to ruin a perfectly good day. After one of these has made a meal out of you, they clean their legs by pulling them through their jaws.

The first of the sunflowers are ready for harvest. Last year I waited too late. By the time I went out to harvest sunflowers, the birds, chipmunks, and squirrels had helped themselves and eaten all the sunflower seeds.

The center of sunflowers is a mass of a thousand to two thousand little flowers. The remaining petals of these little flowers brush off with ease, leaving circular rows of tightly packed sunflower seeds. The largest sunflower of these has around 1,625 seeds. It’s an amazing amount considering that it only took one sunflower seed to grow into a massive plant that produced all those seeds. Which proves that nature’s economic returns are out of this world. You can’t deposit a dollar in a bank and expect to find $1,625 in your account six months later. These days, the most a dollar will become in six months in your bank is $1.01. Get 5% return in six months, and an economist will congratulate you on your fine return. Nature scoffs at such measly returns. Nature doesn’t raise an eyebrow until you see returns of 100,000% in six months or more.

It’s no wonder that of all the creatures on earth, only humans have settled to using money. It’s not worth it. Plant a bean and in four to six months you’ll have hundreds of beans. Put a bit of potato in the ground and four months later you’ll have two to four pounds of potatoes. People are amazed if you can double your money in a year. Nature’s figured out how to do much more than that with ease.

Bzzz, bzzzz, it’s like a busy airport around the sunflowers. Bees of all kinds fly in all day. At times there are multiple incoming flights.

The bee below is a leafcutter bee. You can tell because it is carrying the pollen it collects on its abdomen, not its legs. Leafcutter bees are solitary bees. They build nests in old trees and logs, lining the nests with leaves. A European bee, people have distributed leafcutter bees all over the world because they are excellent pollinators.