In Search Of The Pétomane

7th April
The Coleopterist stayed with us for a few days, he is reknowned for his uncanny ability to find bugs, previously he has supplied us with potter wasps and female earwigs sitting on batches of eggs. We have been searching fruitlessly for the bombardier beetle, an extraordinary beast who keeps two gases in separate chambers in it’s back end, when expelled they combine to make a hot smelly explosion (This is no ordinary fart – there is actually smoke). Thermodynamics scientists have long been trying to mimic the bombardier’s mechanism and there’s also a side story going on with this creature being used to support the creationist argument (mentioned in the two previous links – so I’m not going there).

The Coleopterist spent his first day searching for the bombardier in nearby forests without any luck, then just before supper, while wandering around at the back of the Lovely House he happened across a colony of the shiny green and brown beetles on a weedy bit of broken-up concrete.

These were a smaller variety of bombardier than the ones we were hoping to find, but it was still a result. There was a suitable set ready in the studio so we put one of the beetles on stage to see if he’d perform for us, it was all getting really fiddly and we were just about despairing that we’d never make it work when we noticed a really nice large species of bombardier wandering around on the studio floor.

During his stay, The Coleopterist collected lots of insects including two queen hornets hibernating in bits of rotting log. All these animals are now in the fridge, the hornets still in their logs with an elastic band keeping the bits bound together, the rest neatly stored with a piece of damp tissue in screw-top pots. The cold makes them snooze, then they don’t waste energy running around trying to escape, care for sleeping insects is simple, the jars have to be opened to allow a fresh supply of air in and the damp tissue changed once a week

*The bombardier beetle has only a superficial similarity to French music hall performer le pétomane but I can’t get his image out of my head.

Hornet Fans Forever

3rd October
Whenever I mention hornets to a French person I get told that,
Three stings from a hornet could kill a man

The Director snorts with derision at this, apparently hornets are just large but non-aggressive wasps. He is a big hornet fan, last month he spent days filming a hornet going backwards and forwards from a pear hanging on it’s tree. The pear rotted and fell off the branch while it was being eaten, I had to sew it back on the branch so we could continue filming the whole pear disappearing.

I have great faith in The Director but, faced with the three-sting line from every single resident I’ve met, I’ve not been pushing to find a nest. Wednesday afternoon, with my invincible hair, I bit the bullet and headed to the bar to scout out farmers. I found a stocky man whose own head of dark hair stands up vertically and starts from an unusually low hairline, he is known by the local girls as Hérisson. When I said we needed a hornet’s nest he told me about a felled oak in one of his fields,
it's full of hornets, you can come and film that if you want.

Yesterday morning M.Hérisson took us to his field with the oak.
I’ve just thrown a rock at them to see if they're still there

We wanted to film the nest entrance and the way hornets organise security - they’re like night club bouncers, checking out everyone who wants to come in. The rock stuck in the entrance did make getting a good camera angle a bit tricky but we persevered. After a day with the hornets I’ve come to really like them and their wobbly flying.

That is the last of the insect footage that we expect to get until the spring. Insects tend to hibernate or die off for the winter so the next couple of weeks will be concentrating on getting establishing shots of landscape and habitats. Then the production goes back to the UK to edit the footage we have(100 hours so far) and write the scripts.

Hornet Conquering Hair

1st October
French ladies get their hair done a lot more than English ones and, possibly as a hint to get myself sorted out, I was recently given a gift coupon to use at a coiffeuse in the nearby town. I came back from Paris feeling a little grungy and have just used my hair coupon.

The vogue around here is for a helmet effect, either a shiny bobbed one, or, as the girl sitting next to me was having done, the wig-on-backwards look, where the hair is brushed forward and winged out in front of one’s face. Strong colour effects are a bonus to any style obviously. I have emerged with solid hair, the sort of thing you might clip onto a lego lady,  with such powerful hair I now feel confident enough to tackle the task I have been avoiding since July - finding a hornet’s nest to film. I will be marching the Director and the Camera Boys to the hairdresser tomorrow to get the same invincible hairdo - and then we will conquer the hornets.