Utterly bewitching!

This was the succinct two-word comment that Mark, one of my fellow AGOG’ers, made in response to the email I sent him, which included a link to this short video I’d just edited and uploaded in early June.

I couldn’t improve on Mark’s description. After the drama-filled month of May, and my hope for a more peaceful June, I have to record that it’s been anything but – a month filled with excitement and thrills.

Of these, seeing a brown hare on our land for the first time in the 33 years since we’ve owned the property was, probably, the most special. My first glimpse was indeed fleeting, and entirely thanks to the Agog meeting we held here in the first week of June. And as often happens, a fluke of chance timings. Or a carefully planned stitch in the vast random tapestry of a life, perhaps coordinated by a higher authority. Or merely a random coincidence. Take your pick.

I’d brought the BeeWild book down from The Hut to photograph some of the recent visitors’ comments and drawings, and shown it to Mark and Andy. Mark’s riveting contribution to our post-prandial enlightenment was to discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and, in particular, how it relates to our perception of colours. I’d never heard of these two gentlemen or their theories before.

The two proposed (along with others, over decades) a still contested theory of linguistic relativity. This centres around the concept that the language that we learn, speak and write will shape and influence how we perceive and think about the world. It suggests that the words and grammatical structures of a language fundamentally affect our cognitive patterns and cultural worldview. Mark illustrated this with the different numbers of words that different cultures have to describe colours in the spectrum of (our) observable light. This spectrum does not consist of precise colour bands – we simply choose to describe them as such, a very few definable colours. This is far too big a topic for me to delve into now, but it’s worth reading about if it’s a new concept to you. Or as a quicker option, watch this brilliant short YouTube video, created by Wesley Dean, that explains some of these ideas very well.

Around 8.45 pm, after our AGOG culture club meeting had finished, I took the unusual decision, given the vicious midges earlier in the month, to walk back with the book to return it to the Thought Box in The Hut. As I glanced at some of the orchid flowers to the right of the snaking path up the hill, I saw the unmistakable tall ears, and just the rear of a hare’s head disappearing through the tall grass stems, and out of sight, over the ridge of the field at this point. Two seconds maximum. That was it, but that’s typical for the once-seen but never forgotten fleeting interactions with some of our cohabitants of this special place.

The following evening, greedily, I thought I’d have another look. On this occasion, a stronger southerly breeze was blowing across the field, so I reckoned if the hare was there again, I’d stand a better chance of a photograph if I approached on the other path, downwind of one of the denser patches of orchids in this meadow. I’d got some more daffodil seed to scatter, so anticipating that lightning, or hare views, never strike twice, I was carrying these in a tub in one hand to scatter on the way down, once I’d made it to the hut and not seen anything. Around my neck was the camera, with all relevant settings tweaked for the low light levels, as I walked slowly uphill: I realised that if it were there, a quick shot or two would be all I could realistically hope for.

As I reached about the same point up the hill, and came over the ridge, there ‘it’ was. (Hares are very difficult to sex from physical appearance alone). Looking in my direction, perhaps 25 yards away, at maximum zoom for my bridge camera. I froze.

The hare didn’t.

I slowly raised the camera, focused and took a photo. Then another. Then switched to a video shot. The hare moved slowly, but seemed intent on browsing grass seed heads, carefully stripping them from the tall stems. Rather than, as I’d expected, simply nibbling grass leaves close to the ground, as rabbits usually do. It even seemed to leave the orchid flower spikes alone.

Had it seen me? If so, it seemed unfazed. Perhaps I was unthreatening to it. I was entranced and probably stood, fixed to the spot for 5 minutes of filming, before slowly walking a few paces up the path for a slightly better view. The hare continued eating and moved a little so that its body was visible. It looked directly at me, and into the camera lens, at one point. And kept eating. The video is shaky since the midges were biting, and the camera was held in one hand – I was too absorbed to think to put the seed tub on the ground.

So that was it. Except that over the next 10 days, we had many more sightings of a different young hare, a leveret, around the house and garden, culminating in me observing it motionless and resting amongst the clumps of Agapanthus leaves at the gable end of the house. Our land and garden are thus clearly part of the home range of at least 3 hares this summer – male/female/young. They don’t have defined territories, but rather larger areas that they recognise and move around in as mainly solitary, rather than social, colony animals. These ranges are of variable size, but typically between 30 and 50 hectares (roughly 75 to 125 acres).

All of this got me thinking and reading a lot more about ‘brown hares’, Lepus europaeus, and indeed its dull, common English name. Had no one really studied the hair colour variations in just its wonderfully mobile and expressive ears? Or its anxious, round-pupilled, amber-irised eyes? In light of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I wondered if the name wasn’t in fact a rational descriptive choice for an animal that would be hunted, killed and jugged (cooked with its own blood, which hare muscle mass has an abundance of) by many cultures for centuries. Why use language to instil it with mystical powers, if you were going to try to kill and eat it, year-round? Although hunting them with dogs is now banned, England and Wales currently have no legally binding closed season: hares can legally be shot year-round, meaning many are killed during their spring and summer breeding seasons.

For anyone who hasn’t yet read the beautifully written and magical story of Chloe Dalton’s book ‘Raising Hare’, I’d urge readers to check it out. Here’s a brief taster interview with her, describing the story.

I discovered that hares, which inhabit all continents of the world, except Antarctica – are native to most but introduced by man to Australia and South America. There are 32 species of hares (Lepus), of which Britain has two: the brown hare and the less widespread mountain hare. They have many anatomic and physiological traits which have helped them to survive as classic, small, herbivorous, prey species lagomorphs.

Living entirely above ground, without the safety of a burrow to retreat into, has driven many evolved adaptations – heightened perceptions from those enormous, mobile ears, and almost 360-degree vision from their side-facing eyes set high on the head, are the obvious visible ones.

Less apparent are the larger heart and blood volume, as well as their ability to have multiple litters a year in a long breeding season, and also, almost uniquely, to use superfetation: female hares can ovulate and conceive a second litter just days before giving birth to the first, essentially allowing them to carry two overlapping pregnancies.

Their skeleton and musculature are unusual too:

1: Hares have disproportionately long hindlimbs compared to their forelimbs. The tibia and fibula are fused and elongated, acting as a long lever for maximum force generation during running. Complemented by elongated metatarsal bones in the foot, which extend the length of the leg so the animal runs on its toes, effectively adding an extra joint-like pivot for thrust.

2. The spine is highly arched and specialised to flex and extend deeply. When a hare runs, its back curves and uncurls like a spring, which significantly increases stride length by pulling the hind feet far ahead of the forefeet. The collarbone is rudimentary or entirely absent. This uncouples the shoulder from the ribcage, allowing the front legs to swing freely and increasing the overall forward reach of the forelimbs.

3. Unlike the propulsive hindlimbs, the front limbs act as rigid struts to deflect the body and absorb impact during high-speed turns. Muscle mass in the lower legs is reduced and replaced by long tendons. This makes the lower legs lightweight, allowing for quicker foot placement and rapid changes in direction.

4. The bones of the snout and skull feature a latticework of open bone, and hinged skull bones. This drastically reduces head weight for better stability and acts as a hydraulic mechanism to dissipate the violent, jarring impacts experienced when bounding and landing. The pelvis and lower spine are heavily reinforced to support the immense forces generated by their powerful back legs, preventing skeletal injury during sharp zig-zag turns.

Click here for a recent review of how hares ‘in the field ‘ execute their fast-paced cursorial movements, often from a stationary lying start, to outpace or escape through jinking turns, any following, fast approaching predators.

So much for scientific observation and measurement. But what about hares in culture, myth or folklore? At this point, I began to wonder why it is that we already owned, without any conscious desire to acquire a collection, 5 different hare-inspired items around our house and garden? We have a pair of rusty hedgehogs, and that’s it for other mammals. Here’s a glimpse into the myths about hares from around the world by Edinburgh-based Lari Don. Including from Asian and North American culture, which have stories about how a hare (or rabbit in some versions) came to be banished to the moon. And with the eye of faith, and as an example of lunar pareidolia, one can still see its outline there.

However, this review misses out my favourite hare story, from 7th-century Wales: that of Melangell. Here is the briefest of story summaries, which occurred in the remote valley in Wales, which is still a shrine and retreat for pilgrims from around the world:

Saint Melangell was the first female Welsh saint of the 7th century. According to tradition, she came from Ireland as an Irish princess who fled to Powys, Wales, to live as a hermit and escape an arranged marriage. One day, Brochwel, Prince of Powys, was hunting when his hounds pursued a hare which took refuge under Melangell’s cloak. The Prince’s hounds fled, and he was moved by her courage and sanctity. He gave her the valley as a place of sanctuary, and Melangell became Abbess of a small religious community. After her death, her memory continued to be honoured, and Pennant Melangell has been a place of pilgrimage for many centuries. Melangell remains the patron saint of hares.

I’ve known this story for many years, and bought the CD titled ‘Melangell’, by Welsh triple harp player Llio Rhydderch, over 15 years ago. Here’s the title track, evoking this ancient story and this special place of sanctuary at Pennant Melangell.

Just this week, I’ve discovered another relevant piece of music – Pennant Melangell. Sung here by Aeron Pughe and Malen Meredydd. It’s equally beautiful melodically, and the lyrics are evocative too, but in a theme familiar to a few of my recent posts, they proved very difficult to track down and even trickier to find translated into English.

Read this description of Pennant Melangell, by Matt Pointon, and you’ll see that it’s still a remote, difficult-to-access place, set in the upper Tanat valley on the edge of the Berwyn mountains in mid-Wales. Perhaps keeping these lyrics in a language inaccessible to most of the population of Wales, let alone Britain, and indeed the rest of the world is a good move to help to retain its special status as a sanctuary in today’s frenetic world?

 

Lle mae’r dŵr yn rhedeg yn glir,
Drwy ddyffryn unig, pell o’r trefi,
Sanctfaidd yw’r ddaear, sanctfaidd y gân,
Yn nistawrwydd y mynydd gwyn.

Cytgan:
O Melangell, nawddsant y ffurfafen,
Gwarchod y creaduriaid bach,
O fewn y bryn, o fewn y llan,
Tangnefedd sydd yn aros yma.

Cysgod y sêr sydd ar dy fedd,
Y rhedyn yn tyfu dros y cerrig,
Clyw dorth o heddwch yn y gwynt,
Sy’n codi o ddyfnderoedd y cwm.

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How appropriate then, that before I’d found this song, and these translated words, but after we’d seen the hare, I’d reflected on it finding a breeding sanctuary on our land. So we’d decided to reword the lettering on the Italian Toadflax framed slab, which now welcomes visitors to this special place. It nearly wrecked Fiona’s knees, who had to kneel on a cushioned vet bed, lay out, and then write the new words. I’m so grateful to her, as always, for gamely tackling such patient, careful tasks which are beyond me.

Before moving on from hares, I should also thank Rachael, one of the roughly 50 guests who came to visit the garden on the glorious weekend of June 20/21st. She greeted us bearing a carefully chosen, wrapped small parcel, which contained these 2 additional lovely hare-inspired works of creativity. Thank you so much Rachael.

I should add that 3 days later, she emailed to tell me that as she and her two friends had walked up through the upper hay meadow to reach The Hut, she’d commented that she bet that the hare was silently lying up in the field as they walked around the path, and that it would show itself later, once they had left. And indeed it did – as I walked to close up the shepherd’s hut at 6 pm, after all the visitors had left, there it was again, briefly in the same part of the field.

Another special moment was hearing from another couple who had walked down to our lower meadows and, whilst wandering along the stream, managed to get a glimpse of a kingfisher, flashing off its perch, downstream. I’ve only seen kingfishers on the stream about 7 times in all our time here. For our visitor, it was the first time she’d EVER seen one. More Gelli magic.

With all my talk and thought about hares and words, just a few minutes before our first guests were due to arrive on Saturday morning, I’d suggested to Fiona that we should ask them for their favourite thoughts about hares. She quickly refined my idea, and I found a lovely and appropriate Jackie Morris ‘Quiet Notes’ book, which had lain unused for years.

We already owned Jackie’s beautiful hare storybook for children (and grandparents who like such works of art and storytelling).

Fiona quickly set up the following challenge for any of our guests who were up for it.

Any readers might like to muse on this – I’ll show the frankly unexpected diversity of responses at the end of this post.

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Just before I had the first glimpse of the hare, it was a delight to see 5 swallow chicks appear on the telephone wire and pole, one sunny and cool morning. This always cheers us up. They weren’t as chattery as in some years, and frankly, some were very small and scrawny, but to have got to this age and made it out of the narrowly opened stable door of the barn was a seasonal delight. Will their parents manage a second brood, I wonder?

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Last year, I’d been fascinated to discover the special anatomy of butterfly orchid flowers. And how their pollen-bearing, paired pollinia are positioned to stick onto the eye, or proboscis of appropriate moth species, and thus get transferred to another of the same species orchid flower, which the moth might visit later.

I’d found some images of moths caught in a moth trap, with pollinia stuck to their eyes in an excellent review paper, which I mentioned in last year’s post, and will repeat the link here. Last year, I’d given up on standing out in the meadow, getting bitten by midges for 15 minutes after dark, waiting to get an actual moth/flower interaction photo. No moths appeared!

This year, as a result of another piece of fluke timing, or as a result of another stitch being added to my life’s tapestry, I was returning to the house for lunch after a sweaty session strimming in the Malus copse. Something made me take the longer, less direct path back to base, and in so doing, I passed the first and at that time, only butterfly orchid with flowers actually open. I did a double-take – there was a Silver Y,  Autographa gamma, moth with its head in a flower. My camera was back in the house, some 80 yards away.

Silver Y’s flit quickly from flower to flower. Yet it was still in this flower, 10 seconds after I’d seen it. Worth a punt and a bit more walking, I thought, so I dropped the strimmer and walked quickly down the hill and back with the camera. I couldn’t believe that not only did the moth appear to still be on the same flower spike and wasn’t dead, but it was possibly even on the same flower.

Since it was very battered, I guessed it was a first-generation immigrant, which had arrived in thousands in our garden and meadows during the hot weather at the end of May. I kept snapping stills and videos, and these may well be the only such images or film of this event happening – certainly the only online ones I can find.

They also show the feeding moth with two, possibly three, of what I now know are called pollinaria (pollinarium – singular), the correct word for the entire stalk-and-glue assembly that attaches the pollinia to any visiting insect. It consists of three main parts:

The viscidium: a highly sticky, pedicel-like pad that glues directly to the moth’s eyes.

The stipe: a non-sticky, stalk-like tissue that connects the viscidium to the pollen masses, or pollinia.

The pollinium (pollinia- plural): the waxy, coherent packets of pollen.

Since a friend sent me a link to a request for images of orchid flower/moth interactions with pollinia stuck to their eyes, I sent a few of my stills to Dr. Richard Milne. One might even make it into a new book, which Richard, based at Edinburgh University, has recently been commissioned to write on native British Orchids. He commented:

“It is now 75 years since Summerhayes’ (1951) seminal book about orchids, and I have been given the honour (and mammoth task) of writing a new book on British orchids for the New Naturalist series. The book will not be an ID guide, as many excellent ones already exist; instead, the goal is to distil down 75 years of scientific research on these wonderful plants into an accessible form, telling the stories of their evolution, ecology, and sometimes dramatic rediscovery”.

Richard is clearly a very busy man, having also set up an excellent and simple-to-use online guide to identifying wild flowers, which I can recommend, called Name that Plant, which you can access here.

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We could hardly have hoped for better weather for our last garden open weekend. After a gloomy, wet Friday which limited final titivations to cutting some flowers for the blue bowls, the skies cleared, and after a last walk round the garden paths cutting back downed perennials and shaking the worst of the wet off overhanging shrub stems, the garden looked as lovely as it ever has at this time of the year- as indeed did the wildflower hay meadows.

We’ve been doing this for sufficient years now to be able to stay relaxed and enjoy it. And despite our favoured, time-consuming (for me) email ping pongs to set up our pre-arranged visits, we always anticipate a few last-minute on-the-day requests to visit. Yet this was the first occasion for one of these weekends when we sadly had to turn away one such request. We felt we already had as many people and cars as the ageing hosts (i.e. just Fiona and me) and the garden could handle.

We always enjoy meeting and welcoming complete strangers, who nearly always have fascinating tales to tell and nuggets of information to pass on. How else would we have ever learned, for example, about Martin Crampin, and his latest book, which includes, of course, a section on Melangell titled ‘ Welsh Saints from Welsh Churches: Stained Glass and Other Religious Imagery Through the Centuries’.

Or indeed, Y Bwythyn (The cottage) by Caryl Lewis, the winner of the 2016 Welsh book of the year, a novel in which a hare features as a significant part of the plot, and indeed on the book’s cover image. Sadly, 10 years on, this book isn’t available in a complete English translation. Described thus:

Perfectly paced, structured by the rhythms of nature and the farming year, the novel depicts with compassion the realities of life in an agricultural, Welsh-speaking community forced to adapt to changing circumstances. Lyrical in style yet uncompromising in its acuity of vision, this is Caryl Lewis’s finest novel yet. 

There is a link on this page to a part-translation, which whetted my appetite for more.

We had many, many enjoyable conversations and thank everyone for seeking us out, but after the last couple had left us around 6 pm on Sunday, the longest day, we both felt shattered. There was, however, one final task to complete after supper and moving the sheep – when I saw another hare slowly bounding through our lower meadow, and dropping over a bank beside the stream.

During the day, as visitors had walked past the front door, I’d glanced along the roofline and noticed a very few bees or wasps, high up at the ridgeline, and possibly disappearing beneath a roof slate. It required my camera on maximum zoom to establish that they were indeed honey bees, and that they were definitely entering beneath the roof at this point.

But then, where were they going? Through the masonry and into the disused chimney, which we’d covered years previously in fine mesh to discourage such an event? Or into the loft space?. Or beneath the fascia and soffit void?

An established colony of honey bees in any of these locations would create serious long-term issues with property maintenance, so at 9.30 pm, in the last of the evening heat, I reluctantly donned my bee suit, got out the roof ladders, and made a first effort at spraying the relevant gaps with insecticide-containing foam. If they were just scout bees, I hoped it would deter them. If a small cluster had already moved in, I hoped that a few treatments would nip a new colony in the bud by preventing enough workers from gathering nectar and pollen to establish a new colony nucleus. After 3 repeat treatments, I’ve stopped seeing any bees, during several two-minute sessions spent gazing with my neck bent at this point of the roof.

Eventually, the day ended, and we could collapse into bed. Knowing that the following day would herald the beginning of our 2026 hay-making efforts. A dry hot week had been forecast, so off I set with the powerscythe, trying to gauge how much to cut in one session on the Monday, based on what I reckoned we’d be able to turn, rake and remove in the much hotter conditions forecast for the following days.

By the end of that day, I’d cut several small blocks (conscious that with hares about, my cutting strategy needed to change). The next 3 days were spent manually shaking it out, then turning it, and finally raking it into bags and dragging these across the field to the hay shed. There, after filling a few bags herself, Fiona took on the critical job of emptying them out in tidy fashion and pitchforking loose hay to the very top.

UK readers will realise that much of this work was carried out in conditions of high temperature and humidity. By a couple of near 70 year olds. One of our sons messaged on the hottest day to check how well we were surviving the heat, and on hearing what we’d been up to, messaged back: “Lunatics!!”

For all the Red warnings the Met Office sent out (and it’s worth remembering that it’s controlled by the UK Government through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology), and the closure of secondary schools that our local Carmarthenshire council announced with similarly high hazard imagery, one might have concluded that truly apocalyptic conditions were heading our way.

But then, since COVID lockdowns in Wales, I guess the population has been softened up and is more used to complying with such dire warnings without question.

In years gone by, even in very hot weather, work would have continued – we even have advantages these days with fridges, chiller bags, cold showers, ice packs and bottled water.

And we can adopt a rational approach to bursts of work no longer than 2 hours at a time, if exposed to not just heat but direct sunshine, as is inevitable with old-style haymaking. We even had to slot in shearing the sheep on Wednesday, when Richard was gamely able to come and do the hardest work with our 14 ewes, whilst I caught the ewes, and Fiona rolled fleeces. It was relatively cool in the shade at 23 degrees C – more like 32 in the sun.

And this after he’d already shorn 45 sheep in the morning, elsewhere. He is a star, and like us, I guess, he’s in his sixties. And he’s been doing this for decades of summers.

The sheep were certainly relieved to be cool once more.

Admittedly, by Thursday lunchtime, when we’d completed the haymaking in temperatures nearing 34, it was stretching things to the point of overdoing it. But we could recover in our well-insulated, thick-walled, cool house interior, and thought that Matt’s cartoon for the day summed it up well.

I’m increasingly in agreement with Matt Goodwin, who finds many examples of (to use his phrase), The Narrative State’s role in influencing what we should think. In this recent piece, he writes:

“Constantly fearing a loss of control, constantly trying to retain its power, the Narrative State is continuously trying to influence which facts are emphasised, which voices or ‘experts’ are amplified or discredited, which arguments are considered legitimate, and which conclusions citizens are allowed and encouraged to draw.”

I’ve never received as many Met Office emails as this last week, stressing the heat extremes, with multiple simple coloured dire warnings like this one:

and statements like these two quotes in just one email:

Met Office Deputy Chief Meteorologist Greg Wolverson said: “We’ve seen a new provisional June maximum temperature record for a second consecutive day as the heatwave continues.

“This has been unprecedented heat for the month of June ( no, it really isn’t “unprecedented” – by their own data quoted in the same email – see below…sic) and provides further evidence of how high temperature extremes are becoming increasingly common in the UK as a result of human-induced climate change. There’s a chance of this record being challenged again as the warmth moves more markedly east on Friday, before a gradual easing in temperatures through the weekend.”

And to reinforce the dire warnings:

Professor Stephen Belcher CBE, Met Office Chief Scientist, said: “The heatwave this week is a significant weather event, with a Red Extreme Heat warning issued. Human induced climate change has made events like this more likely and more intense.

“To see temperatures like this in the UK in June is sobering. Events like this bring home the implications of climate change, with very high temperatures and humidity bringing significant health implications from heat stress, as well as impacts to a range of sectors such as transport, energy and water supply.”

Yet in the same email these stark warnings were prefaced by:

This (new maximum temperature) exceeds figures reported on 24 June and, if confirmed via the (presumably very expensive sounding verification process they describe- sic) would become the new daily maximum air temperature record for the month of June.

But earlier still, in this email they stated that:

This week, a number of other weather stations have also exceeded the previous record of 35.6°C, which was reached on 28 June 1976 and 29 June 1957.

I remember 1976 quite clearly, as a long vac. university student, and as far as I can recall, life seemed to carry on quite normally. Back then, it was just ‘hot’. Before that, from June 1957, as a very young baby, I had no conscious recollections at all!

Maybe this is a good time to remind ourselves of other rational people’s views – like Michael Shellenberger:

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All is a high volume sales 2020 book by lifelong environmental activist Michael Shellenberger. He argues that while climate change is real, it is not an existential threat or the end of the world. He contends that alarmism hinders pragmatic solutions and that technological innovation and economic growth will naturally remedy environmental issues.

Hmmm.

But if, as a species, at least in the latest British variant, we can no longer be expected or allowed to carry on as normal in such ‘extreme’ heat, with simply tweaked behaviour, perhaps we could reflect on how our cohabitants manage.

Hares, which can’t sweat, use a number of other strategies to avoid heat stroke, whilst lying in the sun all day:

Their disproportionately large ears are filled with a dense network of blood vessels. By directing warm blood to the surface of their ears, they use them like car radiators to release excess body heat into the air. Their ‘form’ is strategically dug in shaded, well-ventilated areas to block direct sunlight and catch cooling breezes at ground level. Hares will also press their bodies flat against the cooler soil to conduct heat away from their core. While it may seem counterintuitive, their dense summer coat fur provides vital insulation against intense solar radiation, preventing the surrounding heat from penetrating their bodies.

Hares remain completely still during the hottest hours to minimise metabolic heat generation. They conserve their energy and activity for the cooler twilight and nighttime hours. If ambient temperatures peak, they rely on breathing faster (similar to panting) and evaporating moisture through their much larger nasal passages and lungs to cool their blood.

But what about honey bees?

High temperatures, coupled with high humidity, present real issues for honey bee colonies, where man-made hives or boxes are often still uninsulated and sometimes placed in full sun. In addition, at this time of the year, there is often a high amount of water vapour created within the hive, as the bees need to evaporate it from the collected nectar to concentrate it down into a much less liquid honey. The bees’ wax combs, honey and more critically eggs and larvae are all very sensitive to temperatures rising much above their preferred 34 to 36 degrees C range. Above 38 to 40 degrees, and the brood will suffer metabolic damage and die, and the wax combs will begin to deform. Temperatures above 45 degrees are, anyway, fatal to adult bees.

They manage temperature regulation within the hive in a number of ways, including by cooling: worker bees bring water into the hive and rapidly vibrate their wings to create an “air conditioner” through evaporative cooling. Externally, they will stand at an entrance and fan with their wings rapidly, to create air movements inside.

When even this struggles to keep internal hive temperatures low enough for bee safety, many worker bees will leave the colony, and ‘beard’ around the entrance.

Observing beards form quickly on the three colonies which have some sun exposure from noon onwards, made me reach for the excellent new(ish) book I’ve just acquired:

The Observant Beekeeper – A Practical Manual: Treatment free, low intervention. by Paul Honingman

I first came across Paul many years ago, when I discovered The Oxford Natural Beekeeping Group’s blog, which he hosts, and which is linked with the book review above. At last, I thought, there are others who are ‘keeping’ honeybees in a less interventionist approach to most ‘conventional’ beekeepers. I’ve never met Paul in person, but we often tune into the Honey Bee Watch symposia, and we’ve exchanged many emails over the years.

Having only had time to flick through the book so far, I can thoroughly recommend it as THE book for anyone contemplating keeping bees. Or for anyone like me who already does, but is still curious for more information. I showed it to a couple of our garden visitors last weekend, who were considering keeping bees, as the best introduction I’ve yet come across. It’s an absolute mine of information, with many photos and diagrams to illustrate information, and points laid out in a logical, concise, clear format. It’s a complete labour of love, by someone with an engineer’s eye for detail who has kept and observed honeybees for far longer than I have. Paul’s also clearly read around the subject massively to be able to discuss topics so thoroughly and critique options, where they exist – which is indeed nearly every aspect of beekeeping. His approach has also been tried, tested and honed, since Paul has organised workshops for beekeepers of varying experience over several years.

I must also compliment Paul and the publishers for producing the book in high quality and a large format, which makes it even more enjoyable to handle. I love it – it’s a distillation of a serious enthusiast’s decades of experience and research, presented in a fresh, upbeat, easy-to-assimilate style.

Although I am really a minimal intervention ‘beekeeper’ since I rarely open hives up, I turned straight to his page on ‘bearding’. This is what I found – descriptions of what you can deduce from the many types of beards formed by the bees in different circumstances. As expected from Paul’s descriptions, the last 2 of the 3 beards shown above resolved swiftly once temperatures suddenly dropped, and some rain fell. The third, however, although now reduced in size, formed on the colony with the smallest physical space and is still there after 5 days. I think it’s likely that it preludes a swarm leaving this colony in due course, perhaps once the weather warms again next week.

If you watch the video of the bees above, some are definitely vigorously shaking less active bees in the beard, and I’m suspicious that some of these may be scouts who have already been flying out to discover potential new homes, for when, or if, a swarm leaves this colony. Might the bees I’d seen on the roof have been scouts from this colony? Never to return? Or maybe these shaker bees are simply trying to stir bees which have been resting for too long into some sort of more useful activity!

The other two beards were likely a simpler response to too much heat in the hive cavity, causing large numbers of workers to ‘camp out’ until the inside temperatures had dropped back to the normal range.

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I’ll finish with some very special bird song, from one of the resident garden warblers, Sylvia borin, which has been singing, as they do, with prolonged bursts of song for several weeks already. When the really hot weather arrived, we had to leave our bedroom windows open at night to draw the slightly cooler air into the house. As a result, and unusually for me for the shortest nights of the year, I was woken at 4.15 am on consecutive mornings by the garden warbler, already in full flow. After lying in bed for a few minutes, I thought this was just too special a moment to ignore, so I went outside with my mic and camera and spent a happy hour and a half recording it in completely windless conditions, with almost no unnatural ambient noise. Gradually, song thrushes, swallows and others joined in to make it a true chorus as they woke up and joined the party.

The light and views so early in the morning weren’t anything special, and the short YouTube below captures the tail end of my recording, when, believe it or not, the bird’s riffs were getting shorter.

It’s another small bird, which, like our swallows, annually migrates to and from sub-Saharan Africa – in the case of Britain’s population, from Ghana. There, the typical temperatures are stable at tropical levels year-round, ranging from daytime maxima of 30°C to 32°C and nighttime lows only dropping to 21°C to 24°C. (How on earth do the Ghanaians cope???)

The warblers don’t fly as fast as swallows, so the spring migration takes them about 4 to 6 weeks. The journey involves intermittent flights and frequent heavy feeding stops to supplement the fat reserves built up by eating fruit and berries before they leave. In contrast, it takes about 8 to 12 weeks to complete their return, autumn migration from the UK to Ghana. Covering roughly 3,000 to 4,000 miles, these birds, which typically weigh just 16 to 22 gm, fly across Western Europe, the Sahara Desert, and the Sahel before settling in the savannahs and scrublands of West Africa. They take a leisurely route down through Europe, but once they reach the Mediterranean and the Sahara, they shift to making intense, non-stop nocturnal flights over the harsh desert environment, resting in what little shade they can find in oases during the heat of the day.

I wondered whether our warblers suddenly felt they were back in their other, tropical home, and chose to sing non-stop to celebrate?

What if this secretive, small bird ‘thought’ that it wouldn’t need to take the long way home, after all?

Which instantly made me think of this track. A live recording from Roger Hodgson.

 

No doubt ‘our’ warblers will soon be heading back, and the local soundscape will revert to a much less exotic one than we’ve enjoyed recently. But what a joy to appreciate all of this, and be able to record a little of it, while we can.

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Before I go, have you thought of the three words which you would choose when asked what first comes to mind when thinking of hares?

Here’s what has so far been contributed from our garden visitors – too varied by far to help with a word cloud, which is what I had in mind!

Just Brown Hares?

Sapir and Whorf would be impressed by how so many of our minds seem to be filled with descriptive words linked to this secretive, myth-inspiring small creature.