Hypodermic murder

Every time they leave the safety of the hive, the bees are exposed to dangerous, bloody, unforgiving Nature. Fly too high, and the beautiful bee eaters (Merops apiaster) will catch them. Hang around outside the hive, and the imported Asian Hornet (Vespa velutina) will capture, and then disect them.

But I'd never seen this before. An Assassin Bug, Rhinocoris iracundus, killing a bee, by stabbing it with its hypodermic mouth parts and then - I assume - sucking the insides out like some honeyed cocktail:

Fly-by dinner

Juiced in time for tea

Table setting, with orange blossom

 It's rough, out here at the Croft.

Living on Others

It's all interconnected, is Nature. And here is the perfect illustration; a parasite from the plant world, broomrape (Orobanche sp.). It might be Thistle Broomrape, Orobanche reticulata, but then it might be quite a number of similar but different broomrapes. The lack of any green makes them very obvious, in this year's wet and sunny Spring:

No greens for me, chum

The wet spring has also meant a bloom in funghi, and this, I think, is Tremella mesenterica, growing on a felled oak in the woodlands. In a few years, the funghi will have liquidised the tree, enriching the humus and helping recycle the nutrients back to the new trees already growing around it.

 
We are alive thanks to these cycles and recycles...ad infinitum.

Lockdown Veggies

We are very lucky to be here at the Croft in these strange times of lockdown and quarantine. Lucky because of the space to move around outside, lucky because we have livestock that require us to get outside, lucky because we are naturally isolated from the outside world, 4km up a dirt track from the village, and lucky because we have helpful, kind, thoughtful neighbours - people who look out for each other in difficult times.

Just before the lockdown, Hester, the daughter of a friend from Cornwall, and her friend Kerry, came to stay for the night before dashing across the border to France, and then back to England.

We devised and then built an experimental raised bed in the vegetable garden, using hazel poles:

A sticky situation

Hester and Bed

 It's been a total success. We planted it with courgettes (zucchini) and they have bloomed, with the fruit just forming now.

To Marrow is Another Day

Thanks to brilliant planning by Hester and Kerry (or, possibly, good luck), the bed is 1.4 metres x 1.4 metres - in other words 2 square metres*. So if I'm bored in the lockdown I can measure precisely how much water the plants are getting, by emptying 4 litres into the bed - 2 litres per square metre. 

Covid does seem to bring out the obsessive gardener in me...

*Thanks to my dad, a civil engineer, for a correction here