We're having a heatwave... a tropical heatwave....

We've gone from the famine to the feast. Torrential rain has turned into scorchio temperatures. Took a stroll round the garden this afternoon and just looked for the strongest light. Lots of bees, dragonflies and butterflies around . After a barren summer so far, all of a sudden the air is full of Meadow Browns. Have been practicing making up collage templates in Photoshop for ages and then someone told me about PicMonkey. Go to 'create a collage' and five minutes later it's all done for you and all for free. If you don't want to become addicted don't follow the link...... go outside and enjoy the sunshine instead.

Let it bee

 In the way that fate or chance often intervenes in things I had a phone call the day after my last post. It was from the man from the ministry. Well, it was from the bee inspector from DEFRA and he was checking all hives in the area for a disease called American Foul Brood (AFB). Sadly this horrendous affliction has now worked its way this far west but as we had no brood the likelihood of us being targeted was remote. When he heard our tale of woe however he said he'd come the next day to have a look at our hives for us. The swarm we'd picked up on Wednesday had no queen with it and we got the message that the remainder took off later so there was no point in returning to retrieve the rest of them. The bee inspector confirmed all of our hives were queenless and suggested we put all three into one. Now two hives put together will fight it out but apparently three or more thrust together are so shocked and confused they often pull together. It doesn't alter the fact that our bees will ultimately die but it might help stave off the inevitable for a while longer. So now there's only one hive left but the bee inspector is on the look out for another queen or some brood for us whilst he's on his travels but the main season is drawing to a close so we may have to draw a line under it for this year and think long and hard about next year.

We had another call about a swarm last night but this one is in the gutter of a house so my husband passed and gave them a number of someone else. I think he's had enough hassle for this season but he salvaged some of the comb made by the bees from my friend's mum's compost bin to pass back to her. The pristine pieces show the immaculate engineering these fabulous creatures are capable of. Look at those precision made hexagons. Just amazing. The dark spots in the lower piece shows the pollen that the bees had already started to collect and these pieces are bought by companies who want the raw materials to make candles. Somehow I doubt there's enough here to do much with but I could melt it and use it to wax paper or fuse with other materials. If I really had a good idea on how to use it, I just might.

 Whilst we have had some sun at last we've managed to get on with a couple of jobs like clearing the garden and I found this small nest in a sheltered spot, blown down from a large conifer we have. It is dinky and fits all the descriptions of a goldfinches nest. As we had quite a number of fledgelings here this year I am sure this is where it all started for them. I cannot bear to part with these things and have added it to my little collection of garden finds.

Finally, the turn in the weather gave us an opportunity to put out a couple of moth traps this weekend. What a turnaround in numbers. Saturday night's trap yielded 23 different species and 69 moths. It might not sound a lot but it is a massive improvement in numbers for this year. I have recently given a few talks on trapping moths to groups and without fail the memory most people share is that of seeing the 'woolly bear' caterpillar in their youth. When I show them the slide of what it looks like as an adult in the form of the Garden Tiger they are surprised at its beauty, a beauty that has declined by 68% in the last 20 years. Whenever I've trapped them it has always been as single specimens. I have never seen two together so I really make sure I keep it safe and release it the following night to carry on the fight for survival. I am often enamoured of the intricate patterns and subtle colourings of moths and recently came across the blog of an artist who captures their forms quite beautifully. I found the blog via Fiona and it belongs to artist Sarah Gillespie. Do take a look.

Thanks for all the e mails and encouraging comments about the bees this year. It has been a rollercoaster ride and I shall let you know if we're going to do it all again in 2013!

Bee update

'Within that little hive such hints of honey lay as made reality a dream and dreams, reality'

 Emily Dickinson

An inspection on Sunday in our little hives showed that the introduction of the new queens has not been successful. Whilst she eats herself out of her cage for a couple of days to get into the hive, received wisdon says this is breathing space for the occupying bees to get used to her smell thus giving time to make her accepted. If she is not, then the resident bees will undoubtedly kill her.It would seem that neither of our new queens had the essential 'je ne sais quoi' and neither did we capture the queen with the swarm we were blessed with. So, we now have three queenless hives and no new brood. All the bees in situ are bringing in pollen and making honey but all that can happen now is that they will follow their natural lifecycle of six to eight weeks of life and then die. There will be no bees to take their place and the hive will falter and come to an end. We will be left with honey but no bees. A sad state of affairs but we are not alone as this is being reported as a dire year for beekeepers because of the atrocious weather. My husband has never been interested in taking their honey. The average life of a honey bee is six weeks and it takes the lifetime activity of six bees to make one teaspoon of honey! He thinks that for that effort they should keep the rewards of their labour but we will have to extract it if we are left with a supply after the demise of the hive.

The bees from the swarm have also disappeared in numbers, lots dying and being cleared out by the others so when we got a call tonight from my friend Vickie about a potential swarm at her mum Rita's we went over straight away. Not the best photo, but I was secured in the conservatory with Rita at the time, whilst my husband investigated the comings and goings of bees into her compost bin. This is the inside of the lid where they have started to make comb. He gathered up as many as he could into a bucket with a tight fitting lid and we brought a few thousand home with us but a compost bin is not exactly an easy place to extracate bees from so a small amount were left behind. Rita only lives a few miles from us so I drove the short journey home listening to thousands of vocal bees in the container, asking my husband to make sure he had his hands keeping the lid of the bucket closed! We don't know if he's caught the queen so we will be going back in a couple of days after they've settled  to see if we can pick up the surplus. The new bees have now been added to the dwindling hive with the swarm. They may stay and get accepted or all hell could let loose. Who knows? It's just another fascinating chapter in the saga of our bees this summer.

When the day breaks

I came across this ages ago and loved the animation, particularly the way the faces are drawn. See what you think.

Connections and Collections

I am always intrigued when random events come together and suddenly connect. I heard the fantastic news yesterday that my friend Sue received a distinction for her recently completed MA, her degree show being, coincidentally, the last creative exhibition I've been to in the past month or so. Her major working theme has been on collections  housed in the Oxford Museum of Natural History and the same theme of collections has become the focus of new work by textile artist, Stephanie Redfern, whose blog is one of my favourite reads. Through Stephanie's blog,which I can thoroughly recommend,  I was introduced last year to the work of Welsh artist, Clive Hicks Jenkins and I subsequently went to see his major retrospective exhibition at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
You're probably wondering when I'm going to come to the point here but bear with me.... because the connection is that after the exhibition I started to read Clive's Artlog on a regular basis and over recent months I've eagerly read the posts about the creation of two accordion books for a new exhibition, again at the National Library. Yesterday's post on the Artlog detailed the opening of it and, on the spur of the moment I decided to drive up to see it for myself. It was a joy as always to see art in a book form and the artists selected had all approached things in such a diverse way. Each had produced two books, Clive's being an alphabet primer and a book with pop-ups and flaps etc. Sadly the cases enclosing the books precluded trying them out... otherwise I would have tried, believe me! Pop over to the Artlog to see more photos and to read Clive's post about it. Whilst you're there trawl back through past posts to see how the books were thought out. It is another  fascinating blog and rewards regular reading.

 So, like buses, I went to one exhibition yesterday and then today found myself at two more! I went along to the private view this afternoon of an exhibition called 'The Memory Clothes' in Carmarthen, the first solo exhibition of my friend, Lynda Cash, another textile artist working with collections. Lynda's collections of treasured family photos, documents and memories that have figured throughout her life and career have been brought together with a mixture of printing and stitching skills and it was just lovely to see it all brought to fruition. Although I've known Lynda for about 8 years I never knew that her first job was as an apprentice at the couturier house of Norman Hartnell, a favourite of the Queen and the Queen Mum. One of the key images Lynda had used was her first weekly payslip from Hartnell's for £3 4s 5d. It made me wish that I had  kept some of my paper memories like this but I'm enough of a hoarder as it is so it's probably good that I haven't.

Lynda's private viewing was getting busy so I popped across the road for a quick look around the latest exhibition at Oriel Myrrdin. At this point I had bumped into another friend who I offered a lift home to and I could see she was not inspired by what we saw so I shall have to go back again on my own because I certainly was! On display were selected works from the British Council Collection from a raft of contemporary artists all producing work to celebrate the achievements and lasting legacy of Charles Darwin. I quickly took this photo but cannot attribute an artist to it. It is a beautifully rendered pencil drawing of a book cover and brings me to the last coincidence and connection because I have been looking at book collections this week and looking at drawing the patterns made by the spines of rows of books. Don't you just  wonder at how these common threads run through things and how blogging connects us all in invisible ways?

Wet... wet....wet

 Lovely to read blogs this week showing glorious sunny gardens and hand picked flowers.... no really, I mean it... there's no envy in my voice just because it hasn't stopped raining here for days, weeks, months.... the bees won't go out so we're feeding them with sugar syrup. So far I've bought about 20lbs of sugar and have taken out shares in Tate and Lyle. I've been out giving some talks about trapping moths but the bad weather means I haven't actually put a trap out for ages. It was National Moth Night last week, the time for us all to get out and see what's happening.... but not here because it was just so wet. I thought I'd take some photos of my garden today but didn't get far past the back door before it started to hammer down. I'm thinking of moving somewhere drier..... any suggestions?

(S)warming to my theme....

Thanks for the comments and e mails about the bees. I thought I'd give a quick update as the saga continues.... A weekend inspection showed that the queens had gone in both of the new hives and in the stronger one they were making queen cells to replace her. As neither hive has any drones in it there would be no chance that  the new queen would reproduce so my husband destroyed the queen cells and our supplier sent us two mated queens in the post which I collected from the sorting office yesterday morning.

In the meantime we noticed this swarm on Monday evening, high in a cherry tree about 20 feet from the hives. To say we felt beleaguered at this point would be spot on. We thought my husband had missed the emergence of a queen before destroying the cells and they'd left one of our hives, but it is rare for swarms to follow a virgin queen. They are usually an old queen leaving a burgeoning hive and taking half the workers with her. At this point however, all we were thinking was 'could anything else go wrong?'

The swarm was so high in the tree that retrieval seemed impossible but last night my husband made some Heath Robinson contraption and had a go. By this time he'd established, after introducing the newly arrived mated queens to the hives that this swarm were not our bees at all, he'd managed to get some to go into a new hive. They were fanning at the entrance and he thought he'd succeeded but the queen can't have been amongst the ones he introduced as the swarm reverted to the tree pretty quickly.

 I've just taken this photo this morning and it shows the swarm still there. These bees are bigger and darker than ours and must be pretty hardy as we've had nothing but rain since they stopped here. What is the likelihood of a swarm coming here, in such proximity to our hives and at a time of such uncertainty for us?The odds must be long ones to be sure. Going to try again tonight to get this swarm into a hive. Looks like there will be another instalment to this story.....

Postscript : No Heath Robinson artefact required! Tonight, we happened to be on hand when the swarm rose into the air like a tornado and headed towards the empty hive. It was absolutely text book stuff and quite amazing to see it happen spontaneously. Probably shows that Nature's instincts are far better than human interventions!