Posts tagged ‘bee’
Posted in Garden Diary on Thursday, October 21st 2021 (10.13 PM).
This might be the last post on the garden blog for a while; it looks as if it will be going onto a hiatus, for various reasons we don’t need to go into, for an indefinite period. Nevertheless, in the last post I promised to give an update on whether or not the strange chimeric bird food plant—a sunflower surrounded by wheat—would flower. And, indeed, it did. To the delight, as you can see, of bumblebees.
I took this picture about six weeks ago, and it’s been sitting in my to-do pile since. You can see the heads of wheat at the bottom, green still; by now everything has ripened, the wheat has gone yellow and the sunflower has turned into seed for all the local birds. Six weeks ago, as you can see, its yellow was still rich. I’m intrigued by the shape, those tendril-like petals extending like tentacles all the way round. Naturally, I have no idea of finding out what variety it is to try to reproduce it.
sunflower, helianthus, bee, bumblebee
Posted in Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, November 1st 2020 (9.47 PM).
A month since the last post on the garden blog, and not much has changed. For a number of reasons I have not done very much at all in the garden, not least the continuous bleak weather: cold, rainy, and blustery. Occasionally there is a clear night and Mars, Saturn and Jupiter sail smoothly across the sky; but more usually the heavens are filled with fast-moving grey scudding clouds.
The plants are still growing, of course; or are settling down for winter. The honeysuckle’s flowers have gone, and it is covered in little dark round berries instead.
The nasturtiums I mentioned previously are still going strong, though, covering the back bed from top to bottom in yellow flowers and straggling halfway across the decking too. The bumblebees are still feeding from them; next year’s queen bumblebees preparing to hibernate, I presume. In this one, however, I spotted an earwig, its head down and pincers outwards.
Apparently you can sex earwigs by the size and shape of their pincers. I didn’t try with this one, and left it be inside its flower.
autumn, bumblebee, nasturtium, Tropaeolum, bee, honeysuckle, Lonicera, earwig
Posted in Photobloggery, Environmentalism, The Old Garden In Bristol on Friday, September 11th 2020 (8.36 PM).
Some of the wildlife we have spotted in the garden this summer, not including the fox that passed through, then scaled the neighbours’ kitchen roof and was away up the street along the ridgeline of the terrace.
These are all phone pictures, because it’s much easier to whip my phone out when I spot something interesting flying around than to go hunting for a better camera. The biggest pain using the phone for photos like this is the difficulty in focusing on exactly the right thing.
wildlife, bee, bumblebee, honey bee, moth, mint moth, tiger moth, scarlet tiger moth, snail
Posted in Environmentalism, Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Saturday, September 14th 2013 (10.32 PM).
There is one benefit, of course, to leaving the garden to go to seed for a year. It means that the wildlife can get along with things all on their own, without me coming along to pull up their homes and generally keep disturbing things. Whilst clearing the garden up in the past few weeks, we’ve seen lots of shieldbugs, crab spiders, caterpillars, various different insects and suchlike going about their own business and making the most of the place.
A couple of years ago, we bought a bee house, and nailed it up on the wall of the shed. It saw little use, to be honest, apart from by spiders and a couple of holes filled by a mason bee last year. This summer, though, leafcutter bees have found it, and made good use of it.
As you can see from the picture, leafcutter bees are quite picky about the sizes of the holes they will lay eggs in. You can also see one of the holes which a mason bee presumably crawled out of earlier in the year. Hopefully, at some point in the spring, a family of newly-mature leafcutter bees will emerge again.
In other news, we have sowed a few flowers ready for next summer: calendula, forget-me-not and borage. Slowly we’re drifting away from the original idea of making the garden as edible as we could, but that was never a strictly hard-and-fast rule to start with. They are, at least, all flowers which should please the leafcutters and bumblebees at various times next spring and summer. On the herb front, we’ve acquired a few stems of bay, and planted them in one of the wastebins used in previous seasons for growing potatoes. Growing potatoes is difficult to justify in a garden the size of ours; hopefully the bay will make a bush to last for a few years to come.
bay, bee, bee house, borage, calendula, forget-me-not, leafcutter
