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What’s flowering now – Cornwall, April 2022

Kiki, 14/08/2024

Some photos of the flowers I’ve seen out and about in Cornwall and in my garden over the last couple of weeks. I like to see what’s in flower and available for the bees. Below is my miniature apple tree. I mainly see hoverflies and bumbles visiting this. Honey bees tend to favor large collections of one type of flower, so this wee tree is probably not worth it for them. One of the first bees of the year I saw in my garden was the enchantingly named female Hairy-footed flower bee. I always see them on the deep blue…

Iceland sounds death knell for whaling a month after Leo Varadkar’s criticism

, 21/06/2023

Leo Varadkar raised the issue with his counterpart, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, in a bilateral meeting during the Council of Europe meeting in Reykjavík last month. He said Ireland was a whale sanctuary, and was seeing the benefits. Iceland’s whale-watching industry is worth at least three times more than its blubber trade. Iceland has now decreed a suspension of whaling this summer season. It is one of only three countries in the world – including Japan and Norway – that still openly hunts whales, although a secret industry may still operate in Russia, which has a long history of disguising its sea…

First inspections of the spring

, 26/05/2023

In sunny Cornwall I’ve just done my first inspections for 2021 inside the hives. It’s been warm enough for some people to walk around in just t-shirts and for me to wear a t-shirt and cardigan, so it was time. Good news: both colonies are alive and queen-right. Bad news: one (Kensa) is showing signs of chalkbrood disease. My inspecting of Demelza went comically wrong. I started by trying to get all my equipment ready so that I could do some queen marking. I opened a brand new queen marking pen bought last summer and tried to use it on…