Redundant Bees

Yellow-legged Mining Bee, Andrena flavipes

We travelled without my stick to Arundel for lunch yesterday on a  rainy Bank Holiday.   Lots of children there.  I had my usual veggie pasta and salad and The Captain had a rather pallid sausage with mash. He then left me with my coffee and went off to prowl the hides.  It was not photography weather.

While he was away we had a tragedy.   One wall of the restaurant is glass so we look out over the bird lake and island - and a herring gull took a tiny duckling.  It was not a quick death - the valiant little thing struggled - and in the end the gull seemed to drown it.  Before eating it.

Such a short life - and it ended in terror.    The serpent is still in the garden.  But not for much longer now.

I finally got down to my magazine route calls, and all are parcelled up and ready to go, apart from the one I can now deliver on my own - and hopefully without stick.  Its a sunny morning, with showers forecast.  The Captain's Big Butterfly Day Out has had to be cancelled so I hope I have booked him for some shopping and posting.

I came across a sad thing today when browsing the internet. Caroline Glyn, author of the wonderful "Don't Knock the Corners off" - a book that every Minister for Education ought to read (along with Andrea Ashworth's "Once in a House on Fire"), died at the age of 33 - and in a convent at that.
http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/caroline-glyn-in-chawton-hampshire-and.html    Following  a link on the blog I see she had a congenital heart condition.    What a writer she was.

The poor bedraggled yellow legged mining bee on the Captain's Log!   If only he had had some honey with him he could have helped it. Most bees perk up amazingly if you give them a bit of honey.   No wonder its in trouble though. There isn't really any mining industry left.