Busy bees

Another very hot day, another cool walk in the leafy woods for Xena. Then it was the usual Monday morning grocery shopping, and a stop at the dry cleaners to pick up a suit that Gavin had forgotten was there.

I had plans to photograph something else today, but once you start photographing bees it become madly compulsive. Our camera club Facebook group has images from members achieving great success with the tracker thingy on the Fuji cameras, but this was just with standard single point focus, usually manual focus, which is not so easy as the bees do not sit still for a second! In the extra I can see the pollen sacs, a first for me.

I also went to buy some organic slug repellent. We have not really suffered with slugs in the past but now they are getting into my flowers, and the little buggers nibble through the flower stalk right at the top to cut the flowers off. I have some lovely purple pom poms (alliums) lying on the ground where they have been decapitated by these annoying pests.

It's no surprise that the hoped for lifting of Covid restrictions on 21 June will be delayed by 4 weeks. I just hope that in Boris' announcement of this (why does he leak it to the press so we all know the news and then only formerly announce it later?) he will make some exceptions for weddings. Those poor people who have planned weddings for so many months had to cancel last year, they were rolled over to this year and if they are cancelled again... The Indian variant is spreading quite quickly but hopefully everyone gets vaccinated soon and we have good herd immunity. I have now realised that there will be many more variants to come and our lives will never get back to normal for a very many years. We have many pop up clinics or open day clinics where people from our area can just walk in and get vaccinated without appointments, many 18 year olds in our area have already been vaccinated. I wish Tommy was home so he could get vaccinated through this sooner rather than later.