The Japanese plum is in extravagant, exuberant blossom at the moment, so it seemed a good time to take an inventory of the pollinators in the garden. Some were surprising: a wasp with its snout deep in a flower; a shiny, blue-black fly. Others were more expected: a perfect little hoverfly; a bumblebee of some sort.
Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, was the complete lack of honeybees, given that there is an entire hive of the critters sitting just a few metres away. There’s been a lot in the media recently about the importance of honey bees for fruit pollination and some people take hives into their orchards specially for the purpose, but the little slackers don’t seem to be doing me any good. They are bringing home bucketloads of nectar and pollen from somewhere though, so perhaps the reason for their neglect is that they have simply found something better somewhere else. Never mind. Here’s a beautiful bee picture anyway.
Pictures thanks to Andy Coventry.
Maybe your little slackers are off scouting for rape fields to give you a hard time later on… Or given your tropical spring, maybe it’s already in flower with you?
In the middle of Aberdeen, who knows what they’re finding! It makes delicious honey anyway. The tropical spring has got a ridiculous number of things in flower already, but there’s snow forecast for tonight, so they’re going to get a bit of a shock.
Sorry to all the subscribers who got a half-finished version of this post by the way – hit the wrong button!
We find that our bees like to go off to other people’s gardens for forage, even though we have loads of things they are supposed to like..For example. they’ll raid our neighbor’s snowdrops and leave ours well alone.
Beautiful picture of bee!
It is gorgeous, isn’t it? Maybe the girls realise they don’t have to bother pollinating for us; they can cover their rent just by hanging about doing cuteness. (Especially when Andy takes such fine photos of them.)
The out apiary is quite near to a friend’s herb garden, but it took them months to deign to visit any of her flowers. Definitely a law unto themselves.
Emma