My Garden of a Thousand Bees

I am married to a bee-fetishist*, he is also an insect-botherer and a garden-stealer . During the last eighteen months (the Lockdown project) he has been indulging all of these passions by stealing my garden to make a film about all the bees and other insects that live there. PBS are streaming the movie which is titled 'My Garden of a Thousand Bees' 

 obviously it should've been 'Lulu's Garden of a Thousand Bees' but apart from that error I have to admit the film is perfectly decent and, judging by the comments on PBS's site, so do quite a lot of other people.

This blog started with an account of filming insects in France, anyone new here and wanting more hymenoptric content could check out some early posts

I just revisited this post  and only now realise that the garden theft started in earnest 11 years ago

This post  about a disastrous attempt to film a bee hive   is from 2009

 

*he refuses to take my surname so we have to call him Martin Dohrn, he's worried that if he becomes Martin Labonne people will think that he's related to Duran Duran

 

 

image credit: Jack - Thank you Jack

Sri Lanka Revisited

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Getting To Sri Lanka

Highlights of the first 24 hours of our journey to Sri Lanka; note the 3-hour jam on the motorway, the dash for the flight, the random meals and the bit where we are met by NK at Columbo airport, taken to a restaurant and served our third breakfast in 12 hours.
 

When NK laid eyes on the poor straggly things that we had become he said, When did you set off? ... Yesterday morning ... hahahaha ... we now have very a long drive, you are going to kill me .... 

 

Friday, July 9

Today I Am Mostly Buying Foam

After bumping across the country for about 12 hours we finally arrived at the lodge where we will stay and film for the next month.


The first day is spent getting everything set up, we have a lot of very sensitive equipment so we make nests for all the components which we fit in the filming vehicles to help them withstand the battering they will be getting. Mostly what is needed for this is foam and cardboard - I have achieved piles of these items and the two vehicles are now ready to go.

It is bake-a-cake-in-the-oven hot but we can't use the air conditioning because it will upset the many computers that we use outside for filming then bring back inside to transfer and log the images. From now on I will become a Data Monkey working in my room all day tapping away with my fingers and operating a fan with my big toes.

The food is really good here and I'm wondering if sweating counts as exercise.

Sunday July 11th

My World of Wildlife

Every afternoon the boys drive off into the National Park to film proper he-man animals: crocodiles, elephants and leopards. I stay behind at the Lodge, process footage and have a different sort of wildlife experience. The Lodge is in a sandy woody area, guests stay in cabins among the trees. I have set up a work station on a couple of tables in my room and the geckos have taken up residence above me, their tails poke out from the rafters, I like them but wish they wouldn't deposit such unusually large amounts of lizard poo among my hard drives, adding fresh ones every time I go off for a coffee.

When I do go out for a coffee, giant squirrels suddenly appear on branches, close to my face, cocking their big-eyed faces and holding out little paws, (for what? Spare change?), palm squirrels copulate on the table where I am eating my dinner and cows belch and fart explosively outside my window.

In the evenings at six, about two dozen wild pigs come round for drinks, they snorkel noisily around the cabins waving their snouty lips up at the air-conditioning pipes to catch the icy drips. Tonight I watched a big old boar with his head stuck down a drain, front legs knelt down, hind legs on tiptoe, straining his bottom and huge swollen testicles up in the air in an attempt to reach something delicious, he sensed me watching him, jerked his head out of the drain and glared at me, the absolute image of Ken Dodd, it was just an instant, then he tossed his tatty mane and trotted off to join the outlet-lickers.

Wednesday, July 14

Shopping For Man Stuff

Photo: Gayam and W. M. Upali the tuktuk driver, we are eating fishy buns to fortify ourselves for the journey ahead.

Four hours before I took that photo, Gayam and I had come to town in a jeep, we were in search of lunchboxes, batteries, chargers, clips, leads and other motor-related items, we also needed a piece of ply the size of a small coffee table top.

In town there are lots of 'everything shops', they seem to be divided into two types; the ones that sell women’s things like household items, crayons, key rings and shinyshiny. The other everything shops sell men’s things; loudspeakers, bendy tubes, wheelbarrows and batteries.




Most of my items needed to come from the Man Shops, we chose the ones with most car batteries stacked up outside them but each shop only had one component on my list, we went from one shop to another and back again assembling a compatible set of items, none of the items have a guarantee, if you buy and it doesn't work - well that's just tough! You identify the shop selling a battery charger that works and another shop with the battery you are thinking of buying, then you accompany the owner down the road to a place where the equipment can be tested to everyone's satisfaction.

Prior to all this we had spent an hour in the bank, our jeep driver now had to leave, he introduced his friend W.M who would drive us back to the lodge in his tuktuk.
Last item on the list was the piece of ply - the shop would only sell us a whole sheet, the whole sheet was the dimensions of a king-sized bed but a bit longer.

cutting is not possible


A tuktuk is a three-wheeled mo-ped in a cabin with a soft roof, they are usually decorated, this one had gold fringing around the windscreen, a vase of flowers on the dashboard and a red and yellow garland hanging from the ceiling. The three of us looked at the big sheet of wood, then at the tuktuk, we went for tea and fishy buns then we returned to heave the ply onto the roof of the vehicle, we got in and each put an arm out, clamping the sheet onto the roof with a hand - finally ready, we put-putted along the pot-holed road for an hour - all the way home. 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, July 15

The Babbler

At dusk the most extraordinary boinging and hooting noises erupt around my cabin. I think it's mostly birds. There is a dust-coloured bird that comes around several at a time, the size of a fat thrush, it is not at all sleek, they chatter away together and make a lovely sound - I am told that it is a Babbler. I look the Babbler up in Birds of Sri Lanka where Mssrs Wijeyeratne, Warakagoda and De Zylva inform me that it is a garrulous bird ... members of the flock help build each nest, which may be shared

Sweet!


Friday, July 16

The Breakfast of Champions

String Hoppers are a sort of steamed shredded wheat.



To make Egg Hoppers
• Pour coconut milk pancake batter into a bowl-shaped iron pan on a hot ring
• swirl the batter up the sides and crack an egg into the bottom
• Place a lid on the pan and let it steam for a minute or two
• When it is cooked, the steamed egg in it's crispy pancake bowl will slide out onto your plate
• add a spoonful of dahl and a sprinkle of coconut sambal if you like.





Saturday, July 17

More Wildlife Than Might Be Good For Me

I'm much worse at packing than I used to be, I pack far more these days and yet I have only a couple of wearable outfits - the other ninety per cent of my luggage might as well have stayed at home.

I had considered my pyjamas to be redundant, at bedtime I take a cold shower and lie on the bed hoping sleep will come before I reheat. This morning, when I went to the bathroom, I noticed all the gecko pellets stuck on my legs.

A lady sunbird pecks for long periods on my window pane, I think she is attacking her reflection and imagines herself to be arguing with another sunbird but her persistence feels rather Hitchcockian.

Monday, July 19

The Jesus Pig

Just beyond the bushes surrounding my cabin is a bright green lake, the luminosity of which led me to assume that it didn't support much life but I watched as horned cattle waded in to shoulder depth in the mornings, stood around for an hour or two then disappeared back into the bushes. I also saw some deliciously cartoon-ey storks standing in the lake and realised that a lot of birds come visiting here, so I got out my crayons and walked up the spit of sand that runs part-way into the lake to see them more closely.

Yesterday evening I climbed to a look-out post from which I could see the lake. The sand spit was covered with fat man-sized crocodiles, which made me gulp a bit, then I watched a pig emerge from the bushes, keeping up a steady trot, she made straight for the spit, slalomed between the crocs and when she got to the end of the land she kept going, running on the water without slackening her pace until she got to the island in the middle of the lake.

impressive surface tension!

 

Tuesday, July 20

Boundaries

This is a map of my world these days, the film crew occupy three of the two dozen wooden cabins that accommodate the lodge guests, we each have a little fenced-in beer porch outside our front door.

A central wooden building contains the bar and restaurant, there is a Look-Out! tower on top of the restaurant and a fiendish pool outside the bar. The pool looks really good - new guests jump in with the anticipation of a refreshing swim only to find that the water level comes to just above a grown-ups knees. The children have great fun though, there are little islands to leap around on and I spent a happy hour watching three Dutch children playing an interesting drowning/life-saving game there the other day.

Apart from my foam- and battery-buying forays I am confined to the lodge boundaries and have yet to visit the National Park.

Due to the proximity of the park and the quantity of animals that could present us with so many exotic ways to die, we are requested not to venture out of sight of the cabins on our own. I can hear a crashing sea, metres from my cabin but I can’t go and look at it without company.

The Camera Boys are subject to the same restrictions as everyone else, when they pack up the vehicles for the shoot they must include a park warden and everyone stays inside the cars until they get back home again.



Langurs come to play on our roofs, usually a great big herd of them descend and bounce around noisily for an hour before moving on to the next one. 

Thursday, July 22nd

Points of View

Our film is about what happens at night.

If you go into the Park at night, and it is a bit cloudy without much moon, it all looks like black scribble.

With night vision goggles you can see shapes of animals but the ones more than a few metres from the car will be quite fuzzy.



Our magic cameras can magnify the light of a single star by a factor of thousands and translate heat into light. Out in the bush only the one with the camera gets a clear picture.



The view from my cabin is another thing. The Camera Boys give me their boxes containing the fragments of a thousand stories, I sort through the clips, looking for the edge pieces and important details that will accumulate to become The Most Interesting Story, a good one with little sub-plots and dramas.

Saturday, July 24

Some Things...

Sun Protection
I haven't seen a Sri Lankan in sunglasses yet, nor much hat wearing.

There is however, plenty of umbrella-sharing.

Feeling Like A Farmyard Animal
I am often sitting on my beer porch in the evening when the pigs come round, they poke their noses in at me through the railings. I think they are laughing at me.

If they had bananas I think they'd throw me one.


Laundry Conversation
I don’t understand how the laundry system works - a few days ago I put a pile of clothes on my bed with a hopeful note saying laundry. The man who comes in to sweep the room looked at the pile and said

I can’t take the laundry until tomorrow. Here is a bag, write your items on the list

I am confused
But you can't take it until tomorrow?

Maybe I can take it today

Monday, July 26
Jaggery
a concentrated product of cane juice without separation of the molasses and crystals, contains sugars and other insoluble matter such as ash, proteins and bagasse fibers.

Considered to be a particularly wholesome sugar, retaining more mineral salts than refined sugar. Moreover, the process does not involve chemical agents. Ayurvedic medicine considers jaggery to be beneficial in treating throat and lung infections.

Jaggery is for sale in all the shops I go in here - except the ones that sell car tyres - it is one of the things you need to make wattalapam

Jaggery is how I feel when I've consumed too much jaggery - on the other hand maybe it's how I'd feel if I had bee stings around my mouth.

Jaggery-filled things 

The Golden Pudding Cupboard stands at one end of the dining room - a glass case full of sari-coloured sweets.























Wednesday, July 28

Things I Can't Show You

I used to do a lot of people-photographing but nowadays all this bloggy, facebooking, interwebbery inhibits me, not knowing where an image may end up and how it might be used can make the camera an unwelcome intrusion, so mostly I leave it in my bag.

There are so many photos I’d love to take in Sri Lanka; groups of schoolgirls, clustered under umbrellas in the street, their hair in thick black plaits, looking like a flashback to the fifties in impossibly white dresses and ankle socks, I’d also like to snap the men in bright sarongs holding umbrellas, shopping slung around them as they weave between buses on their bicycles.

and there’s the little girl with birds-nest hair dancing on the shop counter in her baggy underwear...

Last time in town I went to buy some sarong fabric. As soon as I walked into the shop the owners called out back to someone to come and see me. A skinny child with enormous eyes and a huge tangled pile of hair peeped from behind the curtain. Initially shy, she was soon showing off and performing dance routines while I shopped. Fabric bought and bagged I asked if I could take a photo, the mother said yes and disappeared so I took a quick snap of the dancing child, said goodbye and was about to go when the mother returned with a set of clothes and a hair brush, she quickly dressed the child and set about taming the hair.

This is the photo I feel that I have permission to use - you’ll just have to imagine other one.

Thursday, July 29

The Mouse Deer Whale Pig

The star attraction of the nature reserves are always the big cats. In Yala the leopard paparazzi flood into the national park every day hoping for a fleeting glimpse of the big spotty glamourpuss.

My own crush is on the much more mysterious and melancholic-sounding mouse deer. The books all describe this creature as secretive and solitary, the sole surviving member of the infraorder tragulina. It runs up low, shallow-angled branches to get itself into trees and it isn't really a deer at all, it is in fact more like a pig, especially in it's sexual behaviour.

The native name for the mouse deer translates as 'a deer and a pig' and my sense of it being stranded between species is reinforced by the wiki entry that says that it has

... a remarkable affinity with water often remaining submerged for prolonged periods to evade predators or other unwelcome intrusion. This has also lent support to the idea that whales evolved from water-loving creatures that looked like small deer


Wednesday, August 11

Trying to Give Gifts

We went along to watch a farmer, his young son and their cattle herd being presented with an anti-leopard pen last week, the idea being that young or sick animals can be put in the pen at night to protect them from leopard attack. The farmer was thrilled, but the calves weren't too keen.

Monday, August 16

The Wonder Dog

This is the hotel dog formerly known as Bollocks. All that changed last year when he was discovered with his head down a python's throat.

The rest of the python was wrapped around the dogs body and squeezing hard, the dog's owner thought Bollocks was a goner but shouted out for help anyway and noticed that the tiny bit of Bollocks that wasn't being strangled, the tip of his tail, wagged in response to his master's voice.

Help had arrived, the two men hit the python with sticks and it released the dog, unharmed but a bit cross, Bollocks bit the python before running home and has been henceforth known as Wonder Dog. 

Bringing Back The Sun

I'm back in the UK feeling all hazy and jetlaggy and it's bloody cold. A little pile of books that I read while I was away are still by my bed so I have been dipping back into them since my return for a warm-up.

The Book of Indian Birds: Salim Ali (1941)
Lovely illustrations and great text, I particularly liked Mr Ali’s descriptions of bird calls, here he is on the Malabar Pied Hornbill’s call;
A variety of loud cackling and inane screams reminiscent of the protestations of a dak bungalow murghi* seized by the cook, and also the yelps of a smacked puppy!

*Baffled I looked for explanation and found this wonderfully informative passage here
The British had set up rest-houses known as Daak Bungalow... Somehow, there was always an Anglo-Indian woman who would found her way to the Dak Bungalow to keep the company of the traveling British officer. Every Dak Bungalow has a love story to tell, only if the walls could talk.

In the rear, every Daak Bungalow had chicken coup manned by 'Murghi wala'


Reef: Romesh Gunesekera (1994)
Narrated by Triton, a young houseboy in the service of his hero Mister Salgado, sensuous and funny, turning chillingly dark towards the end, I loved it’s 170 pages so much that I eeked them out for days.
Thanks for the recommendation Eryl


How to see Ceylon: Bella Sidney Woolf (1914)
An early travel guide, Bella Woolf went to Ceylon in 1907 to visit her brother Leonard and ended up marrying the Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens. Contains fascinatingly descriptive travel itineraries and plenty of useful advice:
A Topee should always be worn until 4 to 4.30 pm even on dull days


Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book (1929)
...constitutes a serious attempt to aid the housewives of Ceylon to practise the art of cooking so that, like the quality of mercy, the preparation of palatable dishes will bless her that gives and him that takes.

Contains recipes for things as diverse as Poached Eggs with Mince and Titta Tibbatu Mallung. I’m particularly fond of the section entitled Invalid & Convalescent Cookery, which gives this advice
Do not consult a patient about his meal, but try and find out what will be liked and let it come as a surprise.

Then follows such appetite tempters as Egg White Water, Beef Tea Custard, Invalid Blancmange, Sago Gruel and Stewed Spaghetti.
Who wouldn't get better when faced with this?

Running in the Family: Michael Ondaatje (1982)
The most delicious memoir of Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan family history, pieced together from photo albums and anecdotes told by friends and family members. I looked for it in a bookshop in Columbo, the elderly salesman snatched it down from the shelf when I mentioned the title declaring
this book is a must have ... an absolute must have
he clutched it so tightly that I had to fight it off him. Anyway it’s great and now it’s mine - here’s a bit;

An aunt gives an account of her journey to Ondaatje's father's wedding, they have seen a car in a ditch and next to it the Bishop who was to officiate at the wedding, everyone knew the man to be a terrible driver - he has to be given a lift.

First of all his luggage had to be put in carefully because his vestments couldn’t be crushed. Then his mitre and sceptre and those special shoes and whatnot. And as we were so crowded and a bishop couldn’t sit on anyone’s lap – and as no one could really sit on a bishop’s lap we had to let him drive the Fiat...

Strange Behaviour

A Camera Boy has just turned up to help us find a giant squid somewhere in the big wet area in front of our house. He is fresh in from Indonesia where he was filming slow lorises (sounds a lot like slow lorries).

The slow loris in the wild is nocturnal and it is the world's only venomous primate; they excrete venom from their elbows and when threatened they lick their elbows to make their bite poisonous.

Before they were brought to my attention by the Camera Boy's filming trip I knew nothing about this animal but now I know that it is cute, furry and big-eyed so they are captured to sell on as pets*. They are also endangered.

*To get round the venom thing their teeth are snapped off.

Head Gear

In Bristol the protracted editing frenzy has finally died down, the editor has moved on to edit someone else’s film, Zena is on an Arctic Ice Tiger Wrestling Safari and Cake Boy is attending a cake-eating marathon on a European ski slope.

This leaves just myself, two Camera Boys, Miss Whiplash and The Director in the house/production office.

The two Camera Boys are young and excitable, they went through an excessive hair phase recently. This spring it seems that it is all about hats; Miss Whiplash is getting concerned about the proliferation of electricity and has been acquiring amulets, I do like cacti but the orgone accumulator is quite bulky and the office is getting a bit cluttered so we are looking for other ways to make her feel happy. Buoyed by their recent success in inventing a new lighting system, the Camera Boys are now developing a special hat for her


This has exposed a curious side of Miss Whiplash; a woman fearless in the face of litigation and all known body fluids. When she’s not looking after the production office she is on the road with her fierce band of rockers, wearing animal-print leotards and feather accessories - this is a woman who shoots flames from her fingernails.

Whiplash has suddenly been plunged into a domestic emergency where she is helping to look after a pile of children. Listening to her account of the weekend I was struck by the difference in our sense of the ultimate Nausea-Inducing-Experience. Hardened by 15 years of life with a man who thinks it’s normal to breed cockroaches to feed to his spiders, I was surprised to hear how upset she was by a few head lice,

I’ve had to spend my weekend combing them out – LIVE NITS!!!

followed by
there’s always a turd on the floor in the morning but I can cope with that!

I’d go for nit-combing over turd-between-the-toes any day – am I alone here?

Office Party

Since the crew went off filming ants, the production office has gone very quiet. Miss Whiplash and I meet up occasionally to eat cake and play the office bongos but we broke out the Champagne yesterday when an email arrived to say that an episode of our insect series (Pollinators) is a finalist in a German Film Festival, I emailed the news on to one of the Camera Boys and asked him how things are going, this is his reply:


Hiya!

I've told The Director about Pollinators and he seemed very chuffed. All is indeed well here and we're churning out some darn cool footage and enjoying it too. Got some great stuff today of aphaenogaster (long legged ants) licking their queen's bottom. We are working in labs amongst lots of scientists, the rooms here are filled with hundreds of plastic boxes full of the ants - it is pretty fascinating. The daytime heat has a very similar feeling to pointing a hair drier at your face, so thankfully we're inside now! We had a seriously spicy Thai meal this evening in a restaurant and so we have put some toilet roll in the fridge in anticipation for tomorrow morning.

Cya!

Testosterone Poisoning?

2nd June
We're all in a bad way at the moment - not me obviously because I'm a girl, but the boys have all got bad legs or fingers or something, one of the Camera Boys is so badly affected by hay fever that one eye is bandaged up and he appears to be out in soldarity with Pirate Cat. Ms Woolsfoot is concerned that we have succumbed to Testosterone Poisoning.


The Director has something snuffly - what could it be - Man Flu? ... no worse,

Swine Flu? ... worse even.

It must be Swan Flu!!!!

Watch out - it's coming to a menagerie near you.

All Quiet On The Home Front

The household has suddenly become smaller again, I took Ms Whiplash (our Production Manager) and one of the Camera Boys to the airport yesterday and dropped Spider Man at the railway station a short while ago. This evening The Director and his son Barney are down at the lake seeing who is the least competent at fishing.


Meanwhile I’m sewing a net curtain into a big shroud that will fit over a wooden frame the size of a shower cubicle. The whole thing will sit outside with Cabbage White butterfly pupae in it and some cabbage plants that I’ve been growing in pots (they are looking a bit stunted), we’re hoping the pupae will hatch, then lay their eggs on the cabbages (and we’ll try and film that).

Sexy Cockroach Girl

30th April
That last roachy post got me a Sexy Blogger Award - I’m beginning to worry about the sort of men I’m attracting:

The deal with the SBA is that I have to tell you 5 sexy things about me;

1. I’m probably even sexier now that I’ve had a wash - apparently some men find cockroaches repulsive and think girls should smell nice

2. I tend not to bother putting a top on, and now that it’s officially Spring I’ve removed the hat

3. I must be sexy because many of the local octogenarians have offered to 'entertain’ me, a fat boy on a bike stalked me last autumn (although it was probabably my friend he was really after) – and Bruno is still hanging his knobbly roots on my gate post

At this point I’m casting around for help, the Camera Boys and Barney have snorted beer out of their noses ...

4. Miss Whiplash says she would snog me - under different circumstances - but I'm a work colleague and she's a consummate professional

5. The Director says that I would be more sexy if I stopped typing and help him find his glasses

I think the SBA is a like an STD that I’m supposed to pass on to others, Madame Defarge can consider herself doubly infected - she is so sexy that she's already picked it up from Emerson - everyone else, please have a go ...

R.I.P Kevin

6th March
Driving a large van and an overloaded estate car, The Director, two Camera Boys and myself set off for France in the very early hours of Tuesday morning, it was a long drive and my putting diesel into a petrol-fuelled vehicle didn’t make the trip any faster.

We got to the Lovely House well after midnight and got the kit and computers locked away before we fell in to bed. The cats are still pretty wild so I’d expected them to stay well out of our way for a while. In the morning I heard an awful sound, outside I found Julie pacing around in front of the house howling, Kevin’s body was lying by one of the outbuildings, we think he must’ve got swiped by a car and used his last energy to make a dash for the house.

New Blood At The Bar

2nd November
The filming really is done for this year, the Camera Boys have returned to the UK - we are now in visiting season. Since Bruno's August visit we have been without doorhandles - he replaced the original knobs with a set that can’t be made to stay fixed on. My parents arrived here a few days ago. They have known me long enough not to expect much in the way of comfort but I bet they had hoped for door handles. No matter - once given a pair of pliers and a monkey wrench they soon got the hang of getting in and out of their bedroom. My mother hasn’t really got the upper body strength to haul the front door open on her own yet though.

We were also suffering from a smelly drain problem. Our squalid kitchen has a concrete sink with a hole through the back wall. The water, and whatever else you put in the sink, washes through to a concrete gutter running the length of the back of the house. Over the years it has silted up and grown over with weeds, the autumn rains have made the area behind the kitchen swampy and putrid. My repeated calls to Landlord and plumber have been ignored. Mum put her foot down, The Director and my father got out the shovels and a wheelbarrow, dislodging unspeakable hideousness to make a drainage channel.

As a further treat for my parents I took them to the bar for some of Mrs Strange’s gin. The Senior Strange’s have already slipped away. But Kurt the tattooed son has returned from Copenhagen with his wife and turns out to be perfectly good at serving gin with flat tonic in a dirty glass from the iceless bar.

Kurt’s wife, Courtney has translucently pale skin, she has only recently started her tattoo collection, they both dress exclusively in black. They tell me that their band had split anyway and that they are going to liven up the bar with 'live bands, gourmet food and that kind of stuff'. Courtney is animated, she says that Kurt’s great in the kitchen - I’m not sure if she means he can cook. Buoyed up with enthusiasm for their plans (and feeling guilty that I’ve now booked to show our film at the village hall) I suggest that they put on a supper for after the film show - I’ll publicise it on the flyer I’m going to put around the surrounding villages next week. Kurt is a sullen kind of chap, he asks what sort of thing I have in mind,
I suggest casserole-type dishes; a daube, coq au vin … a cassoulet?
I’ll do a cassoulet
Something about his response is not putting me at ease.

Timelapse Filming

27th October
The boys are finishing the autumnal establishing shots. A technique we like a lot is timelapse photography - ideal for recording events that take place over a long period like flowers blooming and dying, insects making cocoons or spiders spinning their webs. One simply pops a stills camera on a tripod in front of the subject, set the timer to take a snap every few seconds or minutes. Then, when it's done, run the frames at 25 frames per second and Hey Presto! you see the process fast forwarded. Here’s an example and I really like this one

Timelapse is a good way to show time transitions i.e day to night, sunrises, sunny day turning to bad weather, and so on. In this case it gets a lot more complicated partly because the light changes more, which will have implications on shutter speed and aperture settings. The other complicating factor is that The Director and the Camera Boys have been experimenting with mechanisms that move the camera during the period of the timelapse so that the camera can follow the arc of the moon rising, or sweep the horizon as rain clouds gather. To make these mechanisms one needs a lot of big Meccano-type bits and some clockworky stuff, then you set up your moving tripod and hope the weather does what you’ve predicted. It’s all trial and error but somehow very beautiful and satisfying when it works.

I've just been searching Youtube for a good example of a tracking timelapse - and failed which might make us world pioneers or it might just mean that I'm a bad researcher

Supper and A Lap Dancing Exhibition

26th October
The Director and two Camera Boys flew in from the UK last night. On the way back from the airport we decided to stop at the bar to see if we could enveigle a bit of supper out of Mrs Strange. It was getting late and most of the After-Pétanque diners had gone home except for Vera and the pétanque club captain who were snogging on the barstools. This surprised me a bit because it did look quite uncomfortable and also because he is French and Vera has recently been very scathing about the erotic talents of French men.*

Mrs Strange asked me to help her with the supper so that she could make sure that I’m keeping quiet about her departure in a few days. She tells me that she’s trying to persuade one of her sons to come back and take over.

*if anyone is interested in Vera’s preferences vis a vis Nationality of Lover, I haven’t had time to compile a comprehensive league table yet, but her Top Lover is a motorbike-riding German, his being a mendacious psychopath and married are considered negative factors however they are outweighed by two large positive factors.

Getting Shot At By The Landlord

12th October
It was very misty this morning and the Camera Boys were out around the house getting atmospheric shots of dewy spider webs at sunrise. Suddenly I heard them running in and shouting that someone was shooting at them. We all went out to see who was there and the figure of our foxy-faced landlord in his brand new hunting clothes loomed towards us, proudly carrying a very small dead bird in his pocket.
I'll be back later for lunch
He strode off and we put camerawork on hold for the morning.
I was disgruntled

He came back for lunch having done no more damage apparently, he seemed impressed by all the work we'd done clearing up the outbuildings. The Director wanted me to establish if we could be there another year at least, so I asked the landlord if he was planning to put the property on the market, he said no, we could be there as long as we liked. I then asked about laying a concrete floor in the barn adjoining the house so we can set up a filming studio there, the landlord has agreed to pay half the cost of doing this.
I'm still disgruntled

Digging Stops

Finally yesterday, after two and a half days of digging, the main chamber of the wasp’s nest is located. The Camera Boys wield a teaspoon taped to the end of a bamboo stick, gently scraping away at the wall of the chamber to make a hole big enough to insert an endoscopic lens. The camera is set up by the nest on a mechanism that controls it remotely. People are getting stung now and one of the Camera Boys has a hand swollen up like one of those foam things people wave at football matches.

By the end of the day we'd started getting some pictures - and it is fantastic, the wasps construct thick paper shelves of cells where they lay their eggs, there are layers and layers of this densely populated shelving. The wasps arriving all the time with food for wriggling larvae.

Tart Rejection

17th September
It’s gone all quiet here, The Director and the Happy Camera Boy are back in the undergrowth with the insects and suddenly I’ve got time to catch up on village life.

I had a big cook up and ended up with a surplus tart on my hands, I decided to take it over to Bruno the Knob Destroyer who is still leaving bags of vegetables on our gate. He intercepted me as I was heading up his drive;
What are you doing?
Bringing you one of my tarts – it’s a thank you for all the tomatoes
Well don’t, my wife will get suspicious – go away

I offloaded my tart on nice M Bert across the road and pedaled on to the bar to join in with the pétanque, the club is now a busy, international affair (by village standards). The Strange parents are running the bar double-handedly now that they have been abandoned by their children, their eldest son married his Danish bride and they've gone off to join a thrash metal band in Copenhagen. The other son has also disappeared, possibly to stock up on military outfits and stiff leather boots.

Big Head Ornaments = Small Penis

9th September
As a postscript to the fluffing thing below, I tend not to get asked to fluff if it can be helped, I am considered stupendously impatient, particularly if I have to work with The Director, it is a bit true - somewhere around the two thousand and fiftieth take, when I’ve snipped and brushed and poked with tweezers and I’ve used up all the beetles I’d collected (they fly away when they've had enough), I can get a little scratchy.

I’m not good with figures actually, when I hear statistics I go a bit blurry and when I try and pass on the information I tend to shift the decimal point around. If it’s important, I need someone to tell me the information slowly while I write it on my hand and then try and embed the information as an image in my head. I’ve written the next bit while the Director is hovering nearby.

The Speedy Camera has arrived – with a Youthful Camera Boy, it films in high defintion at up to NINE THOUSAND FRAMES PER SECOND. Filming at normal speed goes at twenty five frames per second (fps) so this camera is something else. The fuzzy wing beats of bees (150 times per second) for example are transformed into graceful balletic gestures. We’ve got it for the week and so far we’ve just been trying it out. I expect I’ll go on about it a bit more another day.

Interesting article in the New Scientist this week. A scientific study on four populations of the same species of horned beetle showed that the ones with the biggest horns had smaller penises, the scientist observes that:

'Strong male beetles use their horns to fight for females, but weaker males prefer to sneak off to mate while competitors are fighting.'

Wasp Fluffing

6th September
Below the Lovely House there is a sunny, overgrown path sloping down to the lake, densely inhabited with Wasp Spiders (Argiope).
The Camera Boys have been hunkered down on this alley (not today, it’s pouring comme vache qui pisse) trying to film Mrs Wasp Spider catching and wrapping up some prey. This has been going on for days. There is a wasp’s nest close to the house and rubber-gloved boys swoop around with large butterfly nets trying to catch wasps which are then loaded into catapults and propelled into the spider’s web. Surprisingly difficult to film this one, many wasps end up getting overshot or fly away before they hit the web.
Crickets and grasshoppers are good though. These animals are completely random with their jumping, they just take off and hope for the best, often landing in a bad place like a spider’s web. Sometimes one of them will just catch the web with the coarse bit of a leg, he'll dangle there, trying to keep as still as possible, looking a bit worried, while he works out how to jump clear before the spider notices him - and sometimes he succeeds - and leaps straight into another web.

Note 1: In the spider's world the girls are usually much bigger than the boys, sometimes to same sort of ratio as a London bus and it's conductor. We film the bigger thing because it's easier - plus the girls are usually much better at hunting.

Note 2: The correct term for a person who handles and tries to control animals on set is a 'wrangler’ but we prefer fluffer. The fluffing job can involve brushing the insects off if they're looking a bit dusty and clearing the set of extraneous debris such as unnecessary foliage or other beasts who might have wandered on set.

Mystery presents and mantids

11th August
Someone has been leaving plastic bags of garden produce hung on our gate. It just started a couple of days ago, lovely knobbly tomatoes and beetroots.

We are currently filming praying mantises, they are solitary, territorial creatures so they are housed in divided up aquariums, I catch crickets, moths and flies to feed them. For filming the mantids are put out on some grass and we hope they will do something interesting; stalk prey, mate, or threaten another mantid (a mantid's threatening thing is to spread her wings and make a sound like a sneezing cat). They may or may not perform but they do tend to fly off when they’ve had enough.

Our biggest mantid, one who we hope will become our 'star’ has a special set made up of long stalky grass stuck in a large flower pot in a sheltered place outside. We’re hoping that she’ll started thinking of it as 'home’ and stay there, but as a precaution against escape, Happy Camera Boy spent yesterday sewing up a net curtain into a sort of soft cage to drape on a framework over the pot.

The kit arrives

6th August
The van arrived late last night with the two Camera Boys. As well as lights, cameras, lenses etc. there's a lot of computer stuff to set up so material can be digitised as we go along.

All systems go

30th July
We're on! fixed the details about schedules and delivery, arranged to borrow more money, the ferries are booked. The Director and I will drive to France on Friday, the Camera Boys will drive down with a vanload of kit next Tuesday. Hoorah!