Dear Readers, my neighbours have the most wonderful yellow shrub in their front garden – it’s some form of Hypericum (St John’s Wort), probably Hypericum x hidcoteense, and is closely related to our native Tutsan. But what stopped me in my tracks this morning was the high-pitched sound of bees buzz-pollinating, or using sonication, to loosen the pollen.

Flowers of the Hypericum family contain not a bit of nectar, but they do have copious amounts of pollen, and at this time of year bumblebee colonies have lots of little mouths to feed, so they want all the pollen they can get. Pollen is a source of protein and fat, and furthermore, not every bee can buzz pollinate – honeybees can’t, most solitary bees can’t, but bumblebees generally can.

I’ve written about buzz pollination before, and food plants in the Solanaceae family, such as potatoes, aubergines and, most crucially, tomatoes, all need to be buzz-pollinated. There are no native bumblebees in Australia, and so there was nothing to pollinate the greenhouse crops, except for poor immigrant workers clutching vibrators who had to ‘buzz’ each flower in turn. Bumblebees were imported, but there was a lot of fear that, if they got loose, non-native plants that currently weren’t a problem could end up being able to reproduce once their pollinator arrived. Research is currently going on to see if the native blue-banded bee, which apparently can buzz-pollinate, could be bred in sufficient numbers to pollinate Australia’s tomatoes. However, the article that I read was written in 2006, and no sign of a bee takeover yet.

Why do some plants need buzz pollination, though? The anthers, which produce the pollen, have a particular shape – they are described as ‘poricidal’, and either have a hole in the top (like a salt pot), or lots of slits in the side (like a pepper pot). The vibration of the bee shakes loose the pollen, which the bee can then comb through into its pollen baskets. This particular relationship between bee and plant means that only insects who can access the pollen will visit the plant – this reduces competition for the bee, and increases efficiency for the plant.

Here’s a little film of a bumblebee on the Hypericum. You can see the amount of effort that goes into accessing the pollen, though sadly not hear the buzzing due to all the background noise. Sigh.

Bumblebees don’t have to buzz pollinate either – the bees on the Hypericum will move happily to the lavender to access nectar and pollen, and seem to know that they don’t need to buzz pollinate. What remarkable creatures they are! It’s well worth stopping to watch them at work. I guarantee they’ll be up to something interesting.

Dear Readers, I’m the treasurer for Friends of Coldfall Wood and Muswell Hill Playing Fields, and for the second year running  I’ve planted up some wildflower window boxes for our raffle at East Finchley Festival. They were very popular last year, and this year we have a great selection of plants – everything from knapweed to scabious via harebells and primroses and cranesbill. It might help a bit if the labels hadn’t dropped off, but in a couple of weeks a lot of them will be in flower and I might be better able to work out what’s what.

The garden has gone berserk, as it often does at this time of year – we’ve had lots of rain after a very dry couple of weeks. It rained so much yesterday that when my husband opened the shed door, he discovered a fox curled up on one of the shelves. I’m not sure who was more surprised, but fortunately the fox was able to make a quick exit (some of the side panels are missing so the shed is basically more like a pergola). The baby sparrows are still taking advantage of all the plant life to look for caterpillars, and in short the whole place has been reclaimed by nature when my back was turned.

Two jackdaws just shot past the window. They’re definitely keeping their eyes open for any opportunity for a quick meal at the moment, and probably have youngsters to feed themselves.

I have treated myself to some betony and some annual echium – I’m still on the hunt for a biennial echium though, one of those with the six-foot tall flower stems. But although the lavender is in full flower, I’m not seeing many/any honeybees. It could be that someone local who normally has hives is having a bad year, or has given up beekeeping, but it still does seem rather odd. I shall have to put my antennae out and see if anyone knows anything.

And so, a pleasant Sunday morning passes, without any revision to do, or any exams to worry about. But do you know, I rather miss it?

Photograph (1) © Copyright Jonathan Billinger and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Dear Readers, I have always loved marigolds, with their cheerful faces,  tolerance of nearly every kind of soil and weather condition and habit of popping up unexpectedly all over the garden. But I have always wondered if the story about companion planting was true. This week in New Scientist, botanist James Wong took a look at the research, and very interesting it was too.

Planting marigolds next to tomatoes definitely did have an impact on nematodes and whitefly: Wong points out that this isn’t surprising, as the volatile chemicals in marigolds (notably one called limonine, which gives lemon balm and citrus fruits their scent) help to protect the plants themselves from pests. Most of the experiments used French marigolds,

Further experiments showed that plants which contained these volatile chemicals, such as basil, reduced whitefly infestation, while other plants, such as mustard, did not. In one whitefly experiment, whitefly infestation was reduced by almost 69%, so well worth trying, I’d have thought.

However, companion planting did not necessarily increase yields – it very much dependent on which ‘companions’ were chosen. When mint was used, tomato cropping actually dropped – this is probably due to mint’s vigorous nature, meaning that it competed with the tomatoes for nutrition, water and even light. I’m very fond of mint, but it can be a little devil, so choose your ‘friends’ carefully!

And finally, Wong found that the scientific studies showed no improvement in the taste of tomatoes at all – not in taste-tests, and not in objective criteria like sweetness or acidity either. So the main reason for companion planting is its demonstrable ability to reduce infestation by pests like whitefly. And, if I was growing tomatoes, that would be good enough for me!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the_ewan/2962762666

Dear Readers, I was paying a visit to Sunshine Garden Centre today when I saw these starry petunias – the variety is known as ‘Night Sky’, or ‘Constellation’, or some such. I was immediately taken back to memories of Dad and his hanging baskets – he had six or seven dotted around the bungalow in Milborne St Andrew in Dorset, and every year he looked for something new. He was very chuffed when he spotted these stripy petunias…

…but the starry ones were very special. I found them online, and sent him some, and he was so delighted. At this point he was still using a step ladder to sort out the baskets every year, but as his health declined, a local woman came to help with planting the garden. She managed to rig up a pulley system so that Dad could bring the baskets down to a suitable height for watering, and so many an evening was spent toddling around the house with a milk bottle full of water (the watering can was too heavy at this point).

I really knew that things were no longer sustainable in the house when I arrived one day to find Dad almost in tears, the petunias in the baskets parched and dry. I watered them but it was too late. Dad made the best of it, and got the gardener to make up some containers near the door instead. But Dad hated that he couldn’t look out of the window and see the petunias.

When he went into the Nursing Home, one of his first ‘jobs’ was to plant up the hanging baskets in the tiny garden. He was ecstatic.

“At least I don’t have to water them!” he said. And yes, they were full of petunias.

And so, although they aren’t good for pollinators, I have a great fondness for petunias, in all their blousy glory. They seem to flower forever, and they bring such cheerfulness to anywhere that they’re planted. I just wish Dad could have seen the array of different cultivars in the garden centre today. He’d have been spoiled for choice.

And it got me wondering. Do you have any plants that remind you strongly of someone that you knew? I suspect that my experience is far from unique….

Well Readers, that’s the exam over and done with – I have a suspicion that I’ve done ok, but then I always to tend to compare what’s possible in a 3 hour exam with what I can do for an assessment, and the former always comes up feeling a bit thin. Never mind. Let’s wait for the results.

In the meantime, we have had a little bit of an ant invasion – they are clearly coming through a hole next to the washing machine. They then walk up the wall and send out search parties across the kitchen work surfaces, bless them. Today I will be sealing up the hole, but it does remind me of those ‘flying ant’ days, when all the queens go on their nuptial flights before spending the rest of their lives underground, laying egg after egg. Was that one glorious day worth all the days and nights in the dark, I wonder? As a child I was always entranced by the wings left in the gutter, scintillating like so many shards of glass.

I’ve written a bit about it here and I rather like the poem below. It’s not mid July yet but, for me, the summer starts now!

Love Song, 31st July by Richard Osmond

Today the queen ant and her lovers
took their nuptial flight, scattering
upwards like a handful of cracked
black peppercorns thrown in the face
of a bear, the bear being in this case
a simile for the population of Lewisham
and Hither Green.

There is an increasingly common assertion
online that the winged of every ant nest
in Britain take off on the same bright
morning. This says less about ants than it does
about the state of media in which we place
ourselves: connected enough to hear
and repeat all claims and verify some,
yet prone to confirmation bias
owing to algorithms which favour
new expressions of that which we already
hold to be true.

Myth moves in step with commerce.
When merchant ships arrived
once per season from the Orient
they brought silk and saffron and stories
of dog-sized ants which mined gold
and took to the sky only to defend
their treasure from camel-riding
thieves. Now we receive the exotic
via fibre optics as a stream of
high frequency trades.

My love, I can’t speak with authority
on commodity futures, the wonders of the east
and the behaviour of insects in Liverpool
and Tunbridge Wells or any city
outside my directly observable reality,
but it’s flying ant day in my heart
if nowhere else.

Dear Readers, you might remember that during a ten-minute break from my revision yesterday I noticed a most unusual bee on my lavender. And to my delight, it’s turned out to be a new species – a Fork-tailed Flower Bee (Anthophora furcata). I should have guessed from the yellow face that this might be related to my old favourite, the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes).

There are a couple of unusual things about this little bee. Firstly, unlike the rest of her family, she is an aerial nester, which means that she’ll make tunnels in dead wood where she’ll lay and provision her eggs. In cases like this, the female eggs are laid first, at the deepest part of the twig or tunnel, with the males laid at the end, so that the boys will emerge first and be ready when the females come out. How the mother bee knows this is anybody’s guess. My bee is definitely a male, as they’re the only ones with the yellow face.

These bees have a great fondness for plants in the Lamium family (such as deadnettle and hedge woundwort), and are also often seen in wetlands, so although this bee is at the front of the house I am wondering if it’s the pond that’s encouraged him. Apparently the females have hairy faces, which they used in order to collect pollen, and in fact this is one of the few solitary bees that have been observed to buzz-pollinate – the bee ‘vibrates’ in order to persuade the plant to release its pollen. But if it’s nectar they’re after, these bees have a tongue almost as long as their bodies.

Female Fork-Tailed Flower Bee (Photo by Nigel Jones athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/insectman/4800228092

One thing I’ve not been able to determine is why, exactly, this species is known as the ‘fork-tailed’ flower bee. I tried putting the query into Google, just to see what their AI engine would come up with, and here we go…

The fork-tailed flower bee is so named because it has a pair of tiny projections at the tip of its abdomen, which resemble a fork. These projections are more noticeable in females, especially when seen from the side. 

Such utter, utter tosh. Can you see any forks on either of these bees? A few red hairs for sure, but nothing fork-y. Let’s be careful about our sources of information, Peeps. This sounds like someone’s best guess, and I suppose that AI has never been programmed to say ‘I don’t know’.

Fork-tailed Flower Bee (Photo byBy Dick Belgers – Nederlands Soortenregister, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=96675671)

Buff-tailed bumblebee

Hi Readers, I have, of course, decided on a new way to revise for my biology exam with just one day to go, which involves going through everything again. Hooray! But I did take literally five minutes to pop outside – the lavender is just opening, and so the bees have discovered it, along with a number of other ‘friends’, like this Rosemary beetle ( I get them every year and the lavender seems to be surviving, so fingers crossed.)

And then a few of my favourite ginger bees turned up – Common Carders. A bit faster than the bigger bumbles, but they have the longest flying season of all the common species. They’ll still be flying around in October if the weather holds. They seem particularly partial to the purple toadflax, which has self-seeded all over the garden.

And here’s a ladybird larva, a harlequin I suspect but still a spiky tiger as far as the blackfly are concerned

And then there’s this little bee, with its yellow face, shiny red ‘fur’ and whizzy nature. I am waiting for some help on what species s/he is, so will report back when I hear! And in the meantime, don’t forget to go outside for a walk. Guaranteed to help with whatever ails you.

Dear Readers, I have just finished revising my Biology course material, in time for my exam on Wednesday, and so I decided to reward myself with a walk around the County Roads here in East Finchley. Actually, I was summoned to the front door by the sound of these two angry crows, and a magpie, who were all mobbing a cat who was hiding under a car. The cat didn’t appear to be menacing anything, plus I happen to know that these crows nest in a tall tree on the other side of the road and so the cat was nowhere near the nest, or any visible nestlings. Still, I think that the birds sometimes get the devil in them, and so the cat lay low for a bit, before strolling away with a nonchalant air, as if nothing had happened.

And so off we went. The tree pit just up the road has some white clover and some very nice agrimony this year – there always seems to be something new popping up.

And this herb robert was doing very nicely in the gutter. What a determined little plant it is!

And the bumblebees were all over my favourite hebe bush at the bottom of Huntingdon Road. If you look closely, you can see the pollen in the basket on the leg of the bumblebee in the centre (these structures are called corbicula, which means ‘little basket’)

And look at these fantastic roses! The single flowers are much more popular with bees than the more complicated double-flowers that we seem to prefer.

There’s a gorgeous peony just about to burst forth…

And the tree ferns that I admired recently are also doing well. I love the way that the leaves unfurl (they’re called ‘croziers’ after the staff that a bishop carries.

These gladioli are gorgeous (and in my view are much nicer than the ones favoured by Dame Edna Everage – I love the dark red colour, and a bumblebee was enjoying the flower too.

And here’s another tree pit, this time featuring sow thistle and mallow – I rather like the combination of yellow and pink.

And this geranium (possibly ‘Wargrave Pink‘?) was growing in the same tree pit. I’m never sure how much these tree pits are planted, and how much they have planted themselves, but they cheer me up either way.

So, two days to go to the exam, and all I need to do now is go through the ‘pre-seen’ material, and then put my feet up. Time was I would be revising until the wee small hours, but in my experience that means that all you can remember is the thing that you did last as all the information hasn’t had time to ‘settle’. But of course, everyone is different. Any last minute tips, Readers? How did/do you cope with exams? Are you glad they’re over, or are you still in the middle of them? And big hugs to anyone else with exams coming up, or who has children/grandchildren about to take them. What a stressful time of year this can be!

Goodness Readers, 31st May was International Parrot Day, but it seems that the cell senescence that I’m currently studying must have migrated to my own brain, because I missed it. Still! There’s always time to celebrate our psittacine friends, intelligent birds that they are, and such a range of species, from budgerigars to cockatoos to macaws to the beloved kakapo (though not quite so well-loved by this TV presenter....)

Kakapo (Photo By Department of Conservation – https://www.flickr.com/photos/docnz/4015891720/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48081940)

When I was growing up I knew lots of people who owned the smaller parrots – budgies, lovebirds and cockatiels to name but a few – but I’m pleased that they don’t seem to be so popular as pets these days. The larger parrots, particularly the African Grey, are so intelligent and in need of company (not to mention long-lived) that they often suffer from health problems in captivity, ripping out their own feathers and developing a whole range of neuroses, poor things. Better to watch them in a wildlife documentary, or see them in. the wild if you’re lucky enough to have a wild parrot population. I’m envious of my Australian friends, some of whom seem to have cockatoos turning up on their balconies on a regular basis.

Leadbeater’s Cockatoo, from Queensland, Australia (Photo By derivative work: Snowmanradio (talk)Pink_Cockatoo_Bowra_Mar08.jpg: Aviceda – self-made by author and uploader Aviceda, who posted the original version to commons at Pink_Cockatoo_Bowra_Mar08.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5586793)

And I would really like to see macaws someday. Such extraordinary colours!

Blue and Yellow Macaw (Photo By I, Luc Viatour, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7427034)

Here in the UK of course we only have the non-native Ring-necked Parakeets, and indeed there are few wild parrots outside of pan tropical regions.. However, there was once an American parrot – the Carolina Parakeet was declared extinct in 1939, after the last captive specimen died in 1910 and no wild birds were seen. It apparently lived in large, noisy flocks of up to 300 birds and, much like the Monk Parakeet (which is still flourishing thank goodness), used to have communal nests, where several females would lay their eggs together and then (presumably) share the incubation and feeding. Apparently the flesh of the parrot was poisonous (Audubon mentions that a cat dropped dead after eating one), possibly because it fed on a toxic plant called the cocklebur. There is some debate about why it suddenly became extinct – it seemed to be doing well as recently as 1904, but then the population plummeted. Some suspect either bird flu or some other disease picked up from poultry, but I suspect we’ll never know.

Carolina Parakeet – Illustration by Audubon

Let me know if you have any parrot stories!

Dear Readers, just because I’m submerged in Stem Cells (metaphorically) during my revision doesn’t mean I haven’t found a little bit of time to do some reading, so here are my current three tomes. When I’m on the tube, I’m reading James Canton’s ‘Renaturing’ and very interesting it is too – it’s in the form of a diary (my favourite kind of non-fiction) and outlines his year trying to ‘re-wild’ a field that he owns. En route, he discusses everything from ponds to the whole concept of ‘re-wilding’, and meets some very interesting people, including some people working on flooding in the Hebden Bridge area, and some people involved in a beaver re-introduction project. He makes some interesting points about how beavers re-engineer the land, and can help to prevent flooding and increase biodiversity. A gentle read that I’ve found it very relaxing to dip into.

Slightly less relaxing is ‘How to Survive a Bear Attack – A Memoir’ by Canadian author Claire Cameron. I picked this up when I was in Toronto earlier this month, and I’m finding it fascinating – it interweaves Cameron’s story with that of a couple killed by a black bear when camping in Algonquin National Park back in 1991. I’m only about half way through, and so haven’t yet discovered why Cameron has scars that she mentions in the first chapter, though i suspect they aren’t bear-related. I don’t think this is out in the Uk yet, but it is keeping me thoroughly engaged, even at the end of a long day of looking at different kinds of cell death (apoptosis, necrosis and autophagy in case you wanted to know).

And finally, this.

I love William Blake. I’ve loved Hoare’s great meandering tomes, such as his previous book about Albrecht Durer ‘Albert and the Whale’. Hoare has such a passion for art, and for the sea, and this book loops through Derek Jarman, Paul Nash, T.E. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde and a whole host of other characters who have been influenced by Blake, without ever losing sight of Blake himself. It’s felt like being on a literary rollercoaster, but I was definitely along for the ride. An idiosyncratic book, but if you like it, you’ll love it. What a writer. And it’s made me want to re-visit Blake’s drawings, and maybe even go and visit the grave marker in Bunhill Fields, which is probably not at all where he was buried.

So, what are you lovely people reading? Fire away!