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

Weekly Round Up

Friday 27th
We’ve had some trials this week; someone went out every morning to set up a timelapse sequence and every day the focus was out. Spider Man was due to turn up on Monday to start logging our footage, he phoned to say that he’d written off his car so we arranged that I’d pick him up at the train station and he’d stay over at our place for a couple of days. On the journey from the station I asked him what happened with his car, he told me that he’d been out on a moth hunt and fell asleep on his way home, he woke the next morning upside down in a field. I might have to rethink the name I've given him.

Mrs Druid has been around a lot over the last few days putting up an electric fence on our land in preparation for bringing her sheep in to graze, she is actually quite lecherous and keeps luring the Camera Boys away from filming to help her bang in her posts. I am now experiencing quite a lot of irritable feelings towards her so I’ve asked her to take the weekend off and we’ll help her bring her sheep in next week*.

It’s gone quiet for a moment, we’ve had lunch, I’ve just taken Spider/Moth/WhateverMan back to the station and one of the Camera Boys has gone back to the UK for a week, the rest of the afternoon is for tidying up. I’m a bit distracted though, The Director has arrived at a significant birthday and soon people are going to start turning up for the weekend celebrations.


* we’ve been bribed with the promise of half a lamb in return for the grazing, there is a lot of grassland here and we can’t afford a mower because we’ve still not got the money from the Big Controller that was due last year

Animal Update
Julie the bereaved cat: has transformed into quite a friendly thing, still very timid but she hangs around us while we’re outside and lets me stroke her sometimes.

Ants: none of them have survived last week's attack, the other relocations we tried in more controlled conditions were also unsuccessful.

Bumble Bees: have made their special wooden box comfy with mud and moss and are happily flying in and out of their new home - we will be filming them next week.

Housing Crisis

19th March
On Tuesday the weather was looking good for rehousing the carpenter ant colony. One of the prepared tree trunks was set nice and firm by the garden shed, the ants had been taken out of the fridge the day before and left in a cool place to acclimatise. We placed them by the entry hole on the tree trunk with some sugar water nearby, they wandered around a bit and gradually disappeared into the trunk - Hooray.

We were just slapping high fives when the TNT van pulled in to the drive, the driver had got out of the cab and we could see her gesticulating at us.

The driver, Sylvie, knows us quite well by now, it turns out that she lives in a town an hour’s drive from here, next door to the mother of the woman who lives three houses away from me, with this degree of neighbourly proximity we’re practically sisters - Sylvie usually stops for coffee after she’s handed over a box of creatures.

On Tuesday Sylvie didn’t stay for coffee, she was a bit irate, she told us that she’d heard buzzing and realised that her cab was filling with bumble bees, she pulled over, slapped a bit of parcel tape over the tear in our package and continued, a little faster than she should've, to us.

Now all our attention was on the bumble bees, we could feel through the outer wrapping that the inner casing was broken. We had prepared a wooden box to house these bees and were keen to transfer them to this as soon as possible - how to get the bees out of the broken package without them all just flying away?

Bees can’t see red light and won’t fly in the dark, we already had a dark room in one of the stables where we’d been filming the blossom, there was even a work table in there, so we set up a red light and undid the package on the table, the bees all tumbled out, they fell off the table and were crawling around on the floor, someone went to find things to scoop them up with.

At this point we heard The Director yelling something about the carpenter ants being under attack. The Camera Boys stayed to herd the bumble bees and I ran off to the ants, arriving on a scene of devastation, lots of tiny black ants had swarmed over our great big carpenter ants who, by this time, had fallen off the tree trunk and were lying around in the grass clearly in a bad way, The Director was sweeping away the black ants and trying to resuscitate the wounded carpenters. We tried to poke the unwounded ants back in their ant hole but they kept coming back out to look for their comrades.

We’ve set up an ant hospital in a margarine container where we hope the survivors might recover...