- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
The erupting springfest of bucolic life goes on apace here. The withies are shedding great quantities of downy seed fluff, which floats everywhere, and lines the verges of lanes lower down the valley. No wonder it colonises everything so easily. Around the cattle pens the sycamores are in full blossom, with faint traces of their heavy scent wafting down as I pass below. There’s a constant rumbling buzzing noise, as the nectar draws insect life from afar, although it’s not just the scent that wafts down. Something is very determinedly dismembering visiting bumble bees in said trees, and the ground is littered with their severed body parts. Whoever it is seem to like the innards rather than the packet they come in, and scoops out whatever juicy bits there are within. Bits with legs still attached reveal that the limbs go on wiggling long after the poor bumblebee is emptied out. I don’t know much about bumble bee anatomy, but I suspect this doesn’t work with people. I’ll ask the next lion I meet. I daresay the culprit is a hornet – an apiarist pal tells me he has trouble with hornets dismembering his bees. We see the odd one about –hornet that is- and I suspect there’s a nest handy somewhere. What to do about it should I find it is another matter. I’m told they’re pretty affable as long as you don’t mess with them. And if you do mess with them, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. I have once reacted badly to what we think was a bee sting, despite being stung by all manner of things over the years. And that reaction was such that I especially wish to find out how I’d react to a hornet. Hey ho.
Smaller, but disproportionately annoying are the midges. After a dry spring, they’ve been slow to get started, but they’re off now. I’ve been working early mornings and late into the evenings unaffected until the last few days, but I know a big hatch is just around the corner, and I’ll soon be in the madhouse with it.
The saving grace at the minute is that I’m spending spare time building a drystone wall, which is satisfactorily up on the top of the brow, where the airborne little swine don’t travel much. Were I down in the valley doing such work…..argh! It doesn’t bear thinking about. When you’re trying to work, and they’re active, they fly in your ears, and eyes, and up your nose. It doesn’t seem to matter how many you swat, or how you wave your arms about, there’s always more….lots more. I don’t know about cultural and religious rites amongst midges, but presume for every one I squish, 10 more have to come to his funeral.
I recall there’s parts of Canada where farmers trying to pick up hay of an evening have to wear full bee-keeping gear – presumably with a finer mesh. Yuk.
Which reminds me…..I hear about some clever experiment being rolled out in Africa, where the mosquito population are carrying some nasty disease. A group of clever boffins have somehow cooked up a fungus with some spider genes in it, specifically the spiders venom… did I get that right? Anyway, wherever the spores of this fungus settle on a mosquito, they kill it in very short order. Marvellous chaps! It’s wiped out 99% of the local mosquito population, and will obviously be a boon to human health. However, I would respectfully sound a note of caution. How sure are we that this particular modified organism is going to stop with mosquitoes? I’d not a sandal wearing lentil muncher, and the concept of GMOs doesn’t faze me per se –or at least until I know a lot more about them. But this really does sound like the stuff of nightmares to me. A fungus could spread on the wind, and maybe it’ll evolve a bit, and start killing some insect not quite as universally reviled as the mozzie. Hmm. I’m sure there’s steady hands on the tiller, and all that, but something ike that could be quite a problem if we got it wrong.
Hey ho. If it does all go wrong, and spreads off into the wider environment, lets hope it does for my midges as well, and perchance the blow flies about to beset my ovine friends.
Gotta go…catch you next time.
Smaller, but disproportionately annoying are the midges. After a dry spring, they’ve been slow to get started, but they’re off now. I’ve been working early mornings and late into the evenings unaffected until the last few days, but I know a big hatch is just around the corner, and I’ll soon be in the madhouse with it.
The saving grace at the minute is that I’m spending spare time building a drystone wall, which is satisfactorily up on the top of the brow, where the airborne little swine don’t travel much. Were I down in the valley doing such work…..argh! It doesn’t bear thinking about. When you’re trying to work, and they’re active, they fly in your ears, and eyes, and up your nose. It doesn’t seem to matter how many you swat, or how you wave your arms about, there’s always more….lots more. I don’t know about cultural and religious rites amongst midges, but presume for every one I squish, 10 more have to come to his funeral.
I recall there’s parts of Canada where farmers trying to pick up hay of an evening have to wear full bee-keeping gear – presumably with a finer mesh. Yuk.
Which reminds me…..I hear about some clever experiment being rolled out in Africa, where the mosquito population are carrying some nasty disease. A group of clever boffins have somehow cooked up a fungus with some spider genes in it, specifically the spiders venom… did I get that right? Anyway, wherever the spores of this fungus settle on a mosquito, they kill it in very short order. Marvellous chaps! It’s wiped out 99% of the local mosquito population, and will obviously be a boon to human health. However, I would respectfully sound a note of caution. How sure are we that this particular modified organism is going to stop with mosquitoes? I’d not a sandal wearing lentil muncher, and the concept of GMOs doesn’t faze me per se –or at least until I know a lot more about them. But this really does sound like the stuff of nightmares to me. A fungus could spread on the wind, and maybe it’ll evolve a bit, and start killing some insect not quite as universally reviled as the mozzie. Hmm. I’m sure there’s steady hands on the tiller, and all that, but something ike that could be quite a problem if we got it wrong.
Hey ho. If it does all go wrong, and spreads off into the wider environment, lets hope it does for my midges as well, and perchance the blow flies about to beset my ovine friends.
Gotta go…catch you next time.
Last edited:
