'I'm a king bee, baby, buzzing around your hive'

The foggy start was slowly followed by thick mist that had become somewhat thinner by teatime. It was completely grey in the sky. The bonus was that anything brightly coloured looked vivid in contrast.

I poked my camera out of the back glass doors at the Pussy Willow Tree (Salix caprea?Also known as Goat Willow), which climbs up and over the adjacent fence. Its male flowers are these yellow, silky soft catkins, which I gather are used for schnapps making in Denmark. (Willow bark and leaves contain salicin, also known as natural Aspirin, or natural pain relief. That's because salicin in the body is converted into salicylic acid, which in synthesized form is the active ingredient in Aspirin. Wiki)

I was still trying to film the birds grazing on the flowers, but my presence and the cold conditions probably kept them away. I did sit for a while sitting on a low wall in the hope of 'blending in', but that didn't help. But suddenly this big bumbling bee appeared right where I had been taking close-ups of some of the catkins.

It steadily flew between the catkins all over the tree, but wasn't easy to keep focus on as it drifted between the various branches and flowers. It did make me happy to see it out and about so early, although I do fear for its future if the weather turns sharply cooler.


more from Wiki:
The goat willow flowers, which many of us probably know better as 'pussy willow', do not have a particularly bright colour, nothing like the sunshine intensity of gorse, or a male brimstone's wings, not even as showy as the palest daffodil. Yet the bushes throw out great hemispheres of lemon-white before there is full leaf anywhere in the landscape, and it's this context that makes goat willow blossom such a moving spectacle.

Since the Chinese like numerous blossoms on a branch, the many buds of the pussy willow make it a favourite flower for Chinese New Year. The fluffy white blossoms of the pussy willow resemble silk, and they soon give forth young shoots the color of green jade. Chinese enjoy such signs of growth, which represent the coming of prosperity. Towards the Lunar New Year period, stalks of the plant may be bought from wet market vendors or supermarkets. Once unbundled within one's residence, the stalks are frequently decorated with gold and red ornaments - ornaments with colours and text that signify prosperity and happiness. Felt pieces of red, pink and yellow are also a common decoration in South East Asia.

Xie Daoyun's comparison of snow and willow catkins is a famous line of poetry and is used to refer to precocious young female poets..

The flowering shoots of pussy willow are used both in Europe and America for spring religious decoration on Palm Sunday, as a replacement for palm branches, which do not grow that far north.