Author: Richard

Air Bee & Bee

A swarm of several hundred honey bees arrived late afternoon yesterday and found a cavity by the bathroom sink waste pipe. A few found their way into the bathroom.

We phoned a beekeeper who offered to come and remove them, using a one-way trap that would lead them out into a hive where eventually the queen would follow them, always the last one out. If we covered every bee-sized hole in the bathroom, we’d be safe using it. As honey bees can squeeze through a 6mm hole that involved a lot of masking tapes, scrunched up newspaper and one strip of cardboard under the sink.

A few workers found their way into the back bedroom yesterday but unfortunately most of them didn’t survive until this morning, when I released them.

Today though they’ve moved on. There was a bit of activity at breakfast time but nothing like when they arrived and we saw nothing all day. In the afternoon I kept watch for a full fifteen minutes, just to check we hadn’t missed them.

The beekeeper advised us to fill the cavity as soon as possible, using steel wool or aluminium foil and also to block any alternative holes they might use. Our group might have been the scouts and the main swarm might arrive later. It’s amazing how many drilled holes for aerial cables and former pipe fittings we spotted.

Jamie Needle

Jamie Needle

Jamie Needle our Liberal Democrat candidate. Today we had another seven candidates’ leaflets drop through the letterbox, so we can’t complain that we’re not being given a choice.

Yorkshire Fog

Yorkshire fog sketchbook page

Yorkshire fog and cat’s ear growing around the pond.

Barbara spotted the remains of a kill by the hedge amongst the border plants: the remains of a juvenile goldfinch, only the wings and legs and a scattering of breast feathers remained. A brown long-haired cat that visits our garden and sits in wait by the bird table is the number one suspect as we haven’t spotted sparrowhawks swooping into the garden for a few months.

sketching by the pond

Hoverflies in the Herbage

herbage

Hemlock water-dropwort grows amongst curled dock and nettle alongside the car park at Newmillerdam. A holly blue butterfly rests on the hemlock while hoverflies visit the flowers of creeping buttercup, occasionally chasing each other around. A micro moth resting on a buttercup looks, at first glance, like a tiny fragment of plant debris.

High Batts

Sawfly, bee-fly and hoverfly, dame’s violet, orchid, crosswort, briar rose and goutweed, orange rust and King Alfred’s Cakes fungus, on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at High Batts nature reserve this morning.

High Batts isn’t far from Lightwater Valley, north of Ripon. Visiting this reserve adjacent to a working quarry is normally by arrangement only but next month they’re holding an open day.

Spider

spider

I wonder if this spider, photographed on our bedroom window yesterday, is one of the spiderlings, now grown up, that we spotted in a cluster by the front door recently.

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Categorized as Urban Tagged

Ahmed & Lightwood

Nadeem Ahmed and Simon Lightwood are our Conservative and Labour candidates for the Wakefield by-election, coming up a week next Thursday on the 23rd. I’ve got my work cut out if I’m going to draw all the candidates as there are 15 of them in total (and there are some great faces to draw amongst them).

There are plenty of smiling photographs of the Labour and Conservative hopefuls but these are from the only two photographs that I could find of them looking serious on Google. Perhaps a bit too serious: Nadeem’s expression reminds me of Peter Jones on Dragons Den when he’s grilling a would-be entrepreneur about shortcomings in a business plan and Simon reminds me of a headmaster telling the assembled pupils that they’ve not only let themselves down, they’ve let the school down too (yes, I’m afraid this did occasionally happen during my school days, but usually only once a term, I’m glad to say).