Is dread too strong a word?

 

Is dread too strong a word?

We joke that Bank holidays are the times that Jellicoe likes to test us. He usually waits until the evening, but it was mid-morning today when he jangled our nerves. It was time for elevenses, and while Herschel and the dogs were alert and keen, Jellicoe was nowhere to be seen.

He had been sitting on the bridge over the pond, earlier. It’s his favourite place in the garden, where he can keep an eye ‘over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,’ as Genesis tells us. Flying things, too, are another interest of his, though he doesn’t usually bother with butterflies and dragonflies.

I called, ‘Cats, cats, cats,’ which usually brings him running, but that failed. I then tried shaking the treats tin, full of tasty dried liver (!), which normally causes him to race towards me. Nothing!

Barry went out to look for him and found him lying on the ground, miaouing to be picked up. He brought him indoors and set him down, but he was lethargic and rather uncoordinated, staggering a little. We decided it was time to try the honey remedy. A fingerful of orange blossom honey was rubbed around his gums and mouth, and within a couple of minutes he had revived sufficiently to eat his food, although he didn’t finish it. However, he wanted to investigate Herschel’s bowl, as usual! It's a variation of the grass always being greener on the other side.

We put him and the remains of his food in the conservatory and shut him in there for peace. We applied some more honey, and he ate a little more of his food. I conducted a fifteen-second breath count, and it was within limits, so we left him. When I went to check on him twenty minutes later, it was hot in the conservatory and he was breathing rapidly, so I opened the door and sat with him for a while.

After the air had cooled, Jellicoe’s breathing was at the higher end of the normal range, but slower. The mid-afternoon feed will tell us more, perhaps, but I have a feeling our bank holiday weekend is going to follow a familiar pattern with Jellicoe visiting his friends at the vet.

We are beginning to dread bank holidays!

Later: the three o’clock feed went well. Jellicoe came bouncing into the sitting room when the Alexa alarm sounded. He seemed to want to eat in the conservatory, so I gave him Herschel’s food and Herschel had Jellicoe’s.

There is just one more meal for the cats today, at 7:00 pm, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed until that one has been completed, hopefully successfully. 

As busy as a bee

 

As busy as a bee

All images courtesy Wikimedia Commons

There wouldn’t be sunflowers,
Wouldn’t be peas,
Wouldn’t be apples,
On apple trees,
If it weren’t for fuzzy old,
Buzzy old bees,
Dusting pollen
From their knees.

Aileen Fisher (1906-2002)

It has been a pleasure to see so many bees recently in the garden, flying from flower to flower, taking the nectar and filling their pollen baskets. 

 Honey bees usually sleep for up to eight hours at night-time in the hive, though they will sometimes sleep in flowers. Young bees may take frequent daytime naps.

Sleeping bees sometimes hold each other’s legs, but a single bee may fall over sideways, holding on with its mandibles to its sleeping post.

Some bees require emergency treatment. A bee that is not flying or collecting nectar is a bee needing help. The quickest way to help it is to find a flower. Otherwise, prepare a sugar water solution of one part sugar to two parts water, and offer it to the bee. Sugar water should not be left out for bees as a general rule, because it will not give them the nutrition they need and may prevent them from visiting flowers and pollinating them. One would think that honey would be a good thing to offer tired bees, but that is a way of introducing potential disease to a colony.

It can take as long as thirty minutes for a bee to recover sufficiently to gather enough energy to fly away.                                                     

However, if the bee does not respond and consume the sugar water, it is likely that she has reached the end of her life.

I have never seen a sleeping bee and the photographs I have included in this post show something I hope I will one day experience.

Golden syrup

 

Golden syrup

F fromTigger’s Wee-Blog posted her grandmother’s recipe for mouthwatering ginger biscuits. It was the mention of one of the ingredients, golden syrup, that triggered this post.

I read recently that Tate and Lyle were changing the 140-year-old trademark on their classic green and gold tins of golden syrup because some customers had complained that the current one was grim. The illustration shows a cloud of bees buzzing around a dead lion. Underneath are the words, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’. The logo and words are repeated on the red and gold black treacle tin. (Tooth-achingly sweet golden syrup is refined from stronger, slightly bitter black treacle, which is said to be similar to molasses.) It holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest unchanged logo. This year, 2024, it was replaced by a stylised lion’s head and a single bee.

Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup became Lyle’s Golden Syrup after the sugar business was sold to American Sugar Refining in 2010. Tate and Lyle continues to trade other commodities.

I remember studying the syrup tin when I was a child, but it never occurred to me that I was seeing something offensive, and even now I see nothing wrong with it. It was based on the story of Samson and the lion in chapter 14 of the Book of Judges. Briefly, Samson killed a lion and later discovered that bees had used the carcase as a hive and produced honey. He then posed a riddle to the Philistines, one of whose daughters he wanted to marry, ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.’

I must remember to keep the empty tin, as a reminder of simpler, less antagonistic times . . . and my childhood.

 My guilty pleasure, but one I rarely indulge, is syrup on hot, buttered toast. 😔 

I like ginger nuts, too.

The bee’s knees

 

The bee’s knees

This expression has been in use since the 1920s, along with similar phrases, like the cat’s whiskers or the gnat’s elbow. All such idioms are used to describe something superlative.

I wondered, ‘Do bees actually have knees?’  In fact, they do. Not only that, they have hairy knees, the hairs being an intrinsic part of collecting pollen. The knees do not form the pollen baskets but are the joints between them. Only the females collect pollen, which is pressed into pollen baskets. Male bees don’t collect pollen; they visit flowers solely to drink the nectar for immediate energy.

The pyracantha bushes are in full flower now and a rich source of pollen. There is a gentle humming of many bees, a relaxing backdrop to a sunny day. The honey bees are very industrious, collecting pollen and drinking nectar.  

They regurgitate nectar to cover the pollen and form pellets which they take back to their hives. The pollen pellets are then formed into bee bread, which is a mixture of pollen, nectar, honey and bee saliva. It is the main food source for adult honey bees and their young, and is stored in cells to feed developing worker and drone larvae.

Newly-emerged worker bees have the job of making beeswax for the colony. Special cells on the bee’s abdomen produce small scales of wax. Bees constantly groom themselves and each other, taking the wax and chewing it with honey and pollen to create the hexagonal wax cells of the honeycomb.

Honey is made from nectar mixed with proteins produced in the bee’s mouth. The resultant mixture is stored in the honeycomb until the water content has been reduced. 

Honey bees are the major producers of honey. Bumble bees make small amounts of honey, but do not live in huge colonies like honey bees, so their honey production could never become a commercial enterprise.

Humans have been benefitting from bee products for about 9,000 years. Ancient pottery artefacts from Europe, the Near East and North Africa have carried traces of beeswax, which suggests that the first farmers kept bees.

Bees originated in Asia around 300,000 years ago and spread rapidly across Europe and Africa. Today, honey bee colonies are under threat across the world. Colony collapse disorder (CCD) was first reported in the USA in 2006. When this happens, the majority of worker bees in a hive disappear and the Queen and remaining young die because they are not being serviced by the huge army of workers that they need to survive.

The causes of CCD are not fully understood and are still being researched. However, it is believed that pesticides, parasites, disease and loss of habitat are major contributory factors.

There are several suggestions that bee-keepers can try in their bid to prevent CCD. One proposal is to replace the old honeycomb with a new one every two or three years to avoid a concentration of harmful chemicals. Stress is not good for bees so it is helpful to make sure there is good ventilation in the hive and also that there is access to plentiful appropriate food.

A parasite that only breeds in honey bee hives and contributes to CCD is the Varroa mite, an external microscopic mite that attaches to the bee and feeds on it, weakening it. It also transmits diseases like deformed wing virus (DWV) to bee larvae. It is the most serious pest for honey bees across the world.

Bees pollinate a huge variety of crops but the bee population is declining and it is imperative to protect it. Our landscapes and our lives would be unimaginable without the intervention of these little insects.