… And a foray up to Highgate Common in the sunshine!
David has had a stonking headcold and was sent home /
elected to not stay in work on Friday so we went for a brisk walk in the fresh
air to try and clear his head. It didn’t really work as he fatigued quite
quickly, but while we were walking we saw bees!
I saw my first ever ashy mining bee, my first ever blood bee, and loads of nomad bees. We also saw a buzzard flying low through the
trees. We didn’t stay for long as David was hacking his lungs up and needed a
lie down. Too much excitement for one day!
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| Ashy Mining Bee |
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| Blood Bee |
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| Nomad Bee |
Momma P and I went up to water Plots 4 and 31 as we had been
planting things and didn’t want them to die. These high temperatures are weird,
unseasonal, and both welcome and not wanted! We cannot work in the heat of the
day – despite living in Saudi Arabia for seven years, neither of us can cope
with the heat (though I pretend I can because I love being outside). We tend to
nip up in the evenings to do the watering. After we did Plot 31 I was having a
look at my new bee house that santa bought for me – and a bee arrived!
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| Bee butt. |
This little lady is a mason bee, possibly a red mason bee.
She makes an egg laying cell by using mud she has collected, lays an egg and
deposits pollen, then seals off the cell with more mud. She will keep doing
this until the tube is full of five or six cells, and then move onto the next
tube. The front two cells are usually destined to become boy bees, they emerge
first so that they are ready to mate with the new females next spring.
In all of my excitement about the bee, I very nearly missed
another exciting thing – a great spotted woodpecker came down and briefly
landed on a fat ball feeder in the plum tree!! I often see and hear them over
the back of the plot but I haven’t seen one on the plots for a good couple of
years now.
I have been putting cat fur gathered from the brush in a
suet feeder, hung in the plum tree, along with some yarn ends and bits of jute
twine. This is for the birds to take as nesting material – the cat fur is by
far the most popular, as I can put it in first thing in the morning and it is
all gone by the evening. The yarn ends aren’t so popular; I guess the birds can
tell between natural and acrylic fibres!
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| Cat hair in the morning |
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| Same day, a few hours later! |
