Friday, 6 May 2011

A bit of a shock and a change of plan


Thursday had some sunny spells but was mostly cloudy and mild. By early evening the clouds had really thickened promising bucket fulls of rain which didn't happen.
















We did get some light rain which amounted to a measly 0.6mm. I have found this chart on Dr Ryan N Maue's site at The Florida State University - Tallahassee. It's a great site if you're looking for weather forecasts for anywhere in the world.
link to website http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/weather/
I've circled the UK and Ireland in red as we're under a blanket of green and blue. If I'm reading this chart correctly most of us should received some rain between the 6th and 14th May. The units on the coloured scale are in inches. 

Now for the scare. I reckoned it was time I removed the remaining winter straw protection from our  banana plants. I picked up one piece of a bale of straw and there was suddenly bees everywhere. I don't know who was most surprised me or the bees. I didn't hang around to find out if they were angry or like me just surprised. After giving them time to calm down I returned to take some pictures.
Bees nesting in straw
After a bit of thought we decided to move as much straw as possible without disturbing the bees any more leaving the rest of the straw in place for the bees to do what bees do. After all the bees need all the help they can get at the moment. We also have a banana shoot coming from ground level after we thought the cold winter had killed off our plants completely.

And of course some of our blue tit chicks hatched. More on that elsewhere on our blogs.

3 comments:

  1. I thought we might get a good downpour today, the clouds were threatening but it didn't happen, in fact, I've just come in from the garden after doing a bit of potting on. I've noticed bee(s) going in and out of a hole in our house bricks. I'm not very knowledgable, do I leave them to get on with it or block the hole up?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm no expert on bees but I'd suggest just leaving them alone. As far as I am aware they are unlikely to do any damage and the nest will only remain over summer at the most. Then you can fill in the hole. If it's an air brick then some fine mesh over the brick will prevent a nest next year.
    Well the overnight down pours forecast for last night never happened here so the drought goes on.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for that. I was expecting the ground to be wet when I got up this morning too, but it's still as dry as a bone.

    ReplyDelete

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