R and I are off to the Cotswold Water Park tomorrow, to spend a week with the family at Howell’s Mere, on the Lower Mill Estate. By this stage of proceedings I should probably have been packing, or at least making a packing list. Emptying the fridge might have been a good idea too, not to mention watering the most vulnerable of my plants. But I didn’t get where I am today by learning to prioritise sensibly, so instead I spent much of the day desk-bound, madly trying to catch up on some of July’s processing, and the journal gaps that built up during the Boy Wonder’s recent visit. If the day ever comes when I’m fully up to date, and processing and blogging in real time, the shock will be so great that I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope.
Anyway, in the end Ōura suggested that I might like to walk about a bit before I took root on my desk stool, and the realisation that so far today I hadn’t taken a photo propelled me outside with the camera. Such was the heat and drought that there wasn’t much to be seen in the back garden, though I was pleased to find a Small Heath butterfly nectaring on yarrow in one of the borders. The front garden was in shade by this time, and there things were a little busier, with a variety of bees browsing the few flowers I have left. R and I are agreed that the most restful of today’s images is this shot of a small Common Carder Bee on the Russian sage – though if I were being picky (which I never am, as you know) I’d have appreciated tidier positioning of the legs. Russian sage is the plant I think of as perovskia (or more accurately, Perovskia atriplicifolia), but the taxonomists have recently been at it, and have renamed it Salvia yangii. I won’t be following this fashion, though: perovskia is the name that’s filed in my brain, and if I start trying to add a new one at this stage I’ll need to forget something else to make room for it.
At first sight I assumed the bee was one of the small workers you often see later in the season, as resources become more scarce and there’s less food to go round the larvae in the nest, but having looked more closely I think it’s actually a fresh male. I hope that his lack of bulk won’t prevent him from finding a mate when the new queens emerge – even though I know, of course, that things don’t work this way in the world of insects, I’d like to think that his speed, charm, and dapper good looks might actually help him to win the genetic lottery.
R: L2, C10, D70.
