Bees

Tuesday 6th October 2020

Online learning today and I spent a few hours researching our work for Thursday - a flower/insect timed count for the UK Pollinator Monitoring scheme http://www.ceh.ac.uk/pollinator-monitoring

We are using ivy (Hedera helix) as the flower and will see what we find. As it was a nice day and I have an ivy hedge I thought I would go out and practice.

I discovered that it is really difficult! No idea how you manage to identify what species you are seeing. I believe that this is an ivy mining bee - one of the 240 plus species of solitary bees in the Uk. However I could very well be wrong - I will report back on Thursday.

I woke up today to no heating and no hot water in the cottage - I tried everything but in the end had to report it to the Porters Lodge (they are the people that fix everything here!). A lovely man turned up and fixed it - he admitted that he didnt know what he was doing but pressed enough buttons and eventually it started back up! Toasty warm here now.