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

Ten years ago

I was in living in a dilapidated French farmhouse - rented on a two-year lease to use as a location for a series of short films about insects. As Location Manager, I stayed in this house during the non-filming periods to take care of it's sporadically bursting pipes and prepare things for the next shooting period. The house was so cold that it was usually warmer outside, I probably got rather too involved with village life. 


The month of February 2009 was eventful, I hosted a lunch event which was hijacked by several unexpected guests, an elderly alcoholic was trying to woo me, the village bar embroiled me in a web of secrets and lies worthy of several Eastenders episodes, I was press-ganged into joining a sports team,  I spent a week cooking for autistic people and somehow found time to pop home to the UK where my friend Ms Whiplash explained how her friends made household cleaning more entertaining.

Ten years ago I had only been writing this blog for a few months, I was amazed and delighted by wonderfully supportive commentary from bloggy friends like  Scarlet and LX -  it was their recent trips down memory lane that prompted me to make this one.

I should be driving to Italy

right now, annoying the Man by singing Cliff Richard songs and arriving somewhere near Verona in time for supper.

But that didn't happen.

I'd already arranged for Rabbit to cover my Brain Doctor days so here we are having a 'staycation' which in my case involves cleaning the kitchen, washing my jumpers and sulking. I am also knitting a garden chair with electrical wire.

The Man has channeled his disappointment into bee maintenance; having planted lots of 'flowers for bees' - his slug-defense strategy is getting progressively aggressive, he is photographing and logging all the insects that come into our garden, particularly the solitary bees and has identified around FIFTY different species of bee just in our tiny city centre patch.

This intense scrutiny also means that he has become an expert in bee First Aid, frequently placing tired bees near a source of food and rescuing rain-sodden bees. On Sunday I saw him taking a tiny glass of water out to clean a bee that was muddy and couldn't fly properly.

Taking My Monsters to Work

I felt a sharp pinch on my shoulder blade when I got dressed this morning. I assumed it was something to do with eating toast in bed and gave the area a light brush with my hand before putting on a sensible jumper and setting off to my job at the Brain Doctor's.

There were little pinches on my back during the day but it would've been unladylike to fiddle inside my clothing so I ignored it.

I have just had a bath. When I got out and started to dry myself SOMETHING REALLY STUNG ME and in the mirror I could see a thing on my red red back - I swiped at it and screamed like a girl and on the floor dropped a very damaged ladybird.

Big Bangs

10th September
It’s Big Bang day over at CERN in the Jura, I haven't quite got to grips with it yet although this cool video I came across on Jacob Russell’s site helped.

Our Speedy Camera see post below is just like having our very own particle accelerator - OK it’s nothing like - but it does show things you can’t normally see. There was a lot of insect filming with it the last couple of days and that was all great but...

Obviously it would've been madness not to have a go at filming other fast things; explosions, smashing stuff, spillages – and someone had the idea of throwing a dart into a water-filled balloon. At 9,000 frames per second you see the dart piercing the balloon, ripping it into 3 sections, leaving a ball of shining jelly water hanging in the air. The dart’s silhouette cuts through the water, slicing up the wobbly blob which explodes into a millions of sparkly drops – bloody brilliant.

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.

Village of the Parasitic Wasps

27th August
Our current big filming location is Wasp Village, a prairie-like area along the banks of a big lake not far from the Lovely House. A complex network of wasps and other bugs live here and do thrilling things.




The Sand Wasp (ammophila) for example; She drags a juicy caterpillar that she's paralysed, to a site she likes the look of, then digs away at the sandy earth like a demented terrier. Hole dug, she grasps her prey, gives it another sting to keep it quiet, hauls it down the hole and lays an egg on it. She then goes to a lot of effort to close up the hole, finding a stone to fit the hole entrance and kicking the excavated sand around it. Then she presses her head against the stone and uses her body as a pneumatic drill, vibrating herself to settle the sand in firm around the stone. Finally she kicks a bit more sand around the site to make it invisible and prevent penetration by her competitors.

Bee City revisited

We've also been filming down at Bee City, a community of solitary bees with some wasps and other creatures that live in the sandy area by the car park at the Salle des Fetes. They survived all the cars driving over them during the village fete last month and are thriving. There about 3 or 4 different species of bee here including the Leaf Cutter Bee who steals other bees homes. Around the bees live a host of other tiny insects that you can only really see by watching the rushes after macro filming.

The Ruby Tailed Wasp is particularly wonderful - in her sparkly red and green outfit she looks like an escapee from a glam-rock band. This tiny wasp watches for a particular wasp (cerceris) to go into a hole with a paralysed Leaf Cutter Bee, the larger wasp lays her egg on the bee and flies off. Ruby Tail nips in quick, before the wasp comes back to seal the hole, and lays her own egg on top, Ruby's larva hatches first, eats the other egg and lives on in the (still live) bee that was caught by the first wasp. A parasite’s parasite if ever there was one.

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.

Bee City

17th July
I've been searching for filming locations, just wandering around locally on foot or bike initially. A few yards away from our place is the Salle des Fetes and I notice at the sandy edge of the car park there are lots of mini volcanoes. Furry bee heads emerge now and again. I watch for a while to see who else lives nearby, there's loads of activity, an insect metropolis.

I'm chatting up the neighbours as much as possible, I'm quite keen to make our activities known in the area as I'm hoping to get help/permission to film on their land. There is a woodyard nearby with piles of rotting planks and tree stumps strewn over a large area. This must be home to all kinds of animals, among them woodlice which will be quite important for us. I ask the yard owner if there are a lot of woodlice around. He looks at me blankly, I lift a scrap of wood off the ground and show him one, he still looks at me blankly, he tells me that he has no idea what this creature is.