Once again, we find ourselves (that’s the royal “we,” not [necessarily] including you) on Darwin Day, without anything prepared to show for it. I have long maintained that we should be celebrating the scientist on some other day than his birthday, since the dead of winter is a hard time to find topical content. The fictional readers that I insist are real shoot back that I’m
Tag: Apis mellifera
Estate Find XI
It’s still a little slow, with the exception of the wood duck visits, but spring is threatening to take hold, as evidenced by small factors in various places, and one of those is what we’re featuring this week.
These are the blossoms of the almond tree, which sprouted spontaneously from the compost pile 13 years ago. It’s demonstrating that the move and transplanting
Walkabout approves…
… of these conditions.
These are all from yesterday, when the temperature here topped 18°c – not bad for December 30th, and I think it got even higher today. A cold snap is on its way, with the possibility of it dipping below -5°c, so these pics are in appreciation, and to refer back to when we’re not going out at all.
First off, the turtles put on a display.
That’s
Ketchup
Okay, I have a bunch of photos I’ve been neglecting, so let’s get some of them out of the way first – there will be another post following this with the rest. Provided I don’t get even more in the interim…
I did make a trip down to one of the osprey nests, right around sunset because that would throw the best light on things, but only one osprey (Pandion
A brief comparison
Just a couple of pics while it’s still slow.
I finished up sorting the other day (which is going through the folder of recent images, discarding those that fail to pass muster, and then moving the keepers into appropriate folders to locate them again easily,) and as usual, I pulled out a couple as curiosities, these being both the same subject. We’ll start with January’s.
Coming
Sunday color, arthropod edition
Continuing the theme, we have a look at the monochromatically-challenged bugs also found on Saturday’s outing.
Had I been inclined, I could have rushed to post this yesterday, since it was National Honey Bee Day, and this is indeed a European honeybee (Apis mellifera.) This was taken on that day, at least, but we’ve already had a holiday for August,
It’s official
… even if it’s nonsense for the most part. Today marks the first day of “spring,” as I am the very first to inform you of because of course you start your day right here. Most people associate spring with flowers and pollinators and trees in bud and birds nests and all that, of which we are slowly seeing the signs of here, just not today, which is
Greasing up the ol’ camera
Okay, don’t do that. All I was referring to was actually getting out to do a bit of shooting (like, over 400 frames) when I’ve been doing almost nothing for the past few weeks. Both students that I had to cancel out on last weekend when I felt like crud had been rescheduled for this weekend, when we had some surprisingly cooperative weather, so I was able to chase some
Amateur naturalism, part five
While I’ve covered some details about specific types of animals in the previous posts, I’ve been slow in getting back to some overall tips that apply to all of them, so with that in mind, let’s talk about behavior.
Years ago I worked at a humane society that, among many other things, offered obedience classes and sport training for dogs, as well as some counseling on behavior problems.
The new lights keep buzzing
The weather got nice today and I was doing some other photos outside, when the persistent buzzing finally got me to look up and see what was going on. It seems this European honeybee (Apis mellifera) thought our holiday lights looked rather appealing, and checked out numerous bulbs along the string before flying off.
Knowing that bees are often guided by how much ultraviolet is reflected by flowers,