30 Days Wild – Day 12

Another post that’s a day late, but I should be able to catch up today!  This is however the start of a very odd week for me!  At Cambridge University there is a thing called “May Week” which is basically a celebration of having finished another year at the University.  Colleges hold May Balls and June Events and everyone has a great time.  Why does this make it odd though?  May Balls often start in the evening and can continue to around 5am, often with dinner and breakfast served at either end (June Events tend to only go on until around 3am)!  Entertainment also lasts all night and as I play with the Cambridge University Ceilidh Band, this can mean some funny hours!  This year the band is doing seven May Balls I think.  Personally I’m doing three of them.  I’ve got one this evening and two on Wednesday night.  I was hoping that I’d be able to catch the dawn chorus, but tonight (well, tomorrow morning) I’ll arrive home too early, and Wednesday night (read: Thursday morning) I’ll arrive home too late!  Sleeping patterns will be odd so you might get some posts at funny times of day – but it does lend itself to some different 30 Days Wild activities!

However, after all that waffle, I haven’t told you what I got up to yesterday, on the 12th June!  Just a quick Colin update: he loves all the attention he’s getting for taking part in 30 Days Wild even though he won’t get up to 30 Days in June alone.  He does have an Instagram account which isn’t being updated regularly at the moment because I’m blogging every day, but after June then it will get updated with cute mouse photos more often!  You can find him on Instagram here!

Stephanelli’s Adventure

So for day 12 of 30 Days Wild I decided to have a hunt around my garden for some bees.  I’ve grown a number of flowers that I hoped the bees would like and they haven’t failed me yet!  We don’t have loads of bees, but the number seems to be gradually increasing which is definitely a good sign!  The favourite plants are definitely my borage followed by my nasturtiums (or Nasty Urchins as I’ve heard them called!).

Bees are fast and hard to photograph so I did end up with some lovely flower shots with either no bees or a fuzzy bee:

But I did strike lucky a few times, the first photo coming up is one of my personal favourites!

I also found a few other creatures on my bee hunt which I wanted to share with you:

7 spot ladybird

Ichneumon Wasp

Small fly

Ladybird Larva

Cinnabar Moth

I love bees and think they are wonderful creatures – not least because they prove that our aerodynamic modelling is flawed!  According to the models, bees can’t fly, but they continue to do so anyway hence proving that we need to do more work on our models!  Bees also always look busy which I find really endearing, and they’re fluffy.  Who doesn’t love something fluffy?

Today’s Haiku:
Orange, yellow, black
Fluff-ball buzzes past, striped blur
Busy with nectar

13 Jun This entry was published on June 13, 2016 at 10:36 am. It’s filed under 30 Days Wild 2016, My Local Patch, Uncategorized and tagged 30dayswild, bees. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.