weeding the library

I decided that it was too humid and hot to work in the garden, and that I would take the day off from physical labour to sort through the piles of old beekeeping magazines lying around the study. Articles with useful and up to date practical advice I pulled out, to be filed for future reference, while the rest is heading for the paper recycling bin.  It's remarkable what you accumulate.  I found a stash of learned pamphlets dating from the 1990s that were being given out free at some conference I went to years ago, by somebody who had despaired of selling them and presumably wanted to de-clutter their own house.  It must have seemed like a good idea at the time to take them, but really I am not going to read about Current Bee Research at Rothamsted, published in 1997, let alone Notes on Cameroon Bee Farming, Analysis of Welsh Nectar Sources, or British Solitary Wasps and Bees with Special References to Species Assemblages.

In the February 2014 edition of The British Bee Journal I did discover what is probably the answer to why we had a highly visible flurry of bee activity outside one of our starling boxes earlier in the year.  For a few days there was an absolute swirl of bees outside, then all went quiet again. Apparently tree bumblebees, which have only recently arrived in the UK, are partial to nesting in bird boxes, and when the virgin queens emerge a cloud of drones may hang around the entrance, trying to mate with them.  This is often the first point at which householders realise there are wild bees using their bird box, and is often mistaken for a honey bee swarm, leading to panic stricken calls to the local swarm collectors.  In 2013 the Chelmsford swarm co-ordinator was getting around a dozen such calls per day.  I have not wobbled my way up a ladder to look at the nest in the box, and my bumble bee identification is pretty ropey anyway, but that would certainly explain the sudden, highly visible activity in front of our box, lasting only a few days.

Browsing through the pages of the web over a cup of tea before settling down to the magazines, I learned that baby turtles communicate with each other by sound while still in the egg to make sure they all hatch at the same time, so that at least some will escape predators and reach the sea.  I gathered this snippet via a link to the website of the Smithsonian, an organisation I associated with 1960s collections of American folk music.  From there I also learned that a cat subjected to zero gravity will turn round, and round, and round, as it behaves as though it were falling, trying to get its legs under it.  A snake, on the other hand, will curl up into a ball, or else bite itself.  It would be possible to waste a lot of time wandering around the pages of the Smithsonian's website, unless of course I have only another couple of clicks to go before it tells me that I have used up my allowance of free page views and must now subscribe to continue.

The Systems Administrator is pressing on with the new, improved technique for making buildings for the garden railway.  This led to a slight frisson when I went into the kitchen to take some meringues out of the simmer oven, to discover a smell of warm plastic and some miniature brickwork curing in the plate warming oven below the meringues.  I sniffed them and could only smell warm, faintly caramelised sugar and not polymer resin, so with any luck they have not taken the smell up.  When I have been making ice cream using egg yolks, it is always a good idea to keep any eye out for further projects involving the whites.