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

Groping Around

I’ve never been keen on winter it does horrors for my skin, my fingers are all cracked and sore and my lips are dessicated. At home the heating system is in decline and is currently not really working so I’m spending more time than is healthy at the office which is still sweltering.

Our new office premises aren’t quite resolved yet. The lights I installed in the production office actually seem to make the room darker, by mid-afternoon with all lights apparently on we need to strap on a head torch to find our way to the filing shelves. There is also an ongoing game of musical chairs, desks and computers as we try and work out where we are all going to fit and who’s best to sit next to.

It's quite crowded at the moment, the whole crew is here and we have an additional Spanish translating lady in for a few weeks, one of the many issues to work out is how to get a rigging team to Costa Rica with a set of crossbows without raising security alarms*

*the reason for weapons will be explained in more detail over here

Last Calm Weekend

Tomorrow the house will be bulging at the seams as the crew will have all returned from the latest filming trip. Yesterday, however I was quite alone in the house when a child came to visit, he’d last been here about a year ago when he was four years old. Not sure if he remembered the house he stood in my kitchen with a puzzled look on his face then he thrust his finger in the air with inspiration, he did know this place, he turned to me and said

Didn’t you used to keep men here?


I recently had a message from a friend asking me if I was off gallivanting - such a lovely word, one that might describe an interesting way of moving; something involving high stepping, prancing and the tossing of one’s plumed head, I think gallivanting is a more energetic form of catering



After writing about my recent encounter with Bearpit Man it dawned on me that the reason that I could now understand his words was because he seems to have overcome a speech impediment, an aspect of him that I hadn’t properly registered before,   like when someone you know shaves off a moustache and you can’t work out what’s wrong with their face.

I saw Bearpit man again this morning pushing a big wire shopping trolley that he had ingeniously modified for his catering forays, he showed me around the trolley’s compartments stuffed with thermoses and stacks of cups that he had pre-dosed with coffee powder and sugar