Bee feeding

A busy day all round started with a quest for the right screwdriver to unlock the parts of the strimmer I need to clean after I'd dropped Helena at her work. I finally found a shop with an extremely friendly and helpful assistant who located the tool and made sure it was the correct one, and at the cheapest possible price.  Then I drove up to the Cotswold hilltops to the farmshop to stock up with vegetables where I bumped into my friends Ashley and Keith who run the farm.

Keith mentioned the day I went with him to look at and photograph some of their bee hives, and told me that at one of their sites we'd visited that the bees had succumbed to a virulent infection and many had died.  

I then drove back to Stroud to meet John W. at his home and we ended up sitting in the sunshine in his lovely colourful garden on the edge of the Painswick valley drinking coffee and discussing photography.  While I was there waiting for him to return from walking Theo, his dog, I spotted some bees feeding on these plants growing out of a wall overlooking the neighbouring field.  I quickly snapped away at them hoping to catch one or two images of a bee in flight. So I was pleased with this impression showing the amazing blurred speed of its wings enabling it to hover and collect the nectar from these very beautiful little flowers, whilst its body remains completely still.  I've added another picture of it in flight from a different angle as an 'Extra photo'.

Then I had to go back to the office I blipped yesterday for another four hour meeting about the organsiation of the Plan.  We had good news that the second grant we'd applied for has been approved in full which means we can complete all the special research we wanted to achieve as well as producing all the necessary newsletters to inform the parishioners of what is being done for the town's future.