Bee wary

The Bank Holiday weekend, at least between the showers, was one of the peak times for bumblebees in our garden.  All of the Nectaroscordum plants, and we have hundreds, were flowering and bumblebees love them.  The garden has come alive with the humming, incessant activity of these insects.  Here we have a tree bumblebee suspended in mid-air as she works the pendent umbels of this plant.  

If anyone can spare an hour of their time, I would recommend watching this video of a lecture given by one of the leading bumblebee researchers, Dave Goulson, earlier this month.  He is a brilliant communicator, fascinating, informative, passionate and persuasive.  He reports on the research that pinpoints the reason for the tragic and continuing decline of bumblebees in our countryside, years after agricultural intensification supposedly tailed off in the 1990s.  His latest research is essential reading for anyone buying plants to attract bees to their garden - beware many plants bought from large garden centres as bee-friendly are anything but, they may have been dosed with extremely toxic neonicotinoid insecticides.

In our garden we are trying to provide a range of food plants for the bees so there will always be something for them to forage from during the flight season.   We will be extremely careful to check the provenance of any plants we buy in.

Anyway, enough proselytising.  Thank you for all the hearts, stars and comments on the sunset egret blip.  Apologies once more that I have been slow to comment back.  My batteries are almost completely drained, and are not recharging well despite lots of sleep over the weekend.