Willow Herb.

Today was a day for beekeeping instruction with one of our new mentors (one of last year's pupils) showing one of this year's intake how to inspect a bee colony; I tried to take a back seat, my role is to leap to the rescue if there are any difficulties; we will be working as a team for the next twelve months. I was pleased to not that the demonstrator was quick to notice that there was the wrong number of combs in the hive and that some of them were incorrectly spaced; she obviously had a good tutor last year. The hive floor was manky, so we changed that and left the hive in good order ready for the winter; it's  good to get these things sorted while the weather is fine rather than to leave it until the last moment. We had been warned what to expect but we should not have needed to spend the best part of three hours dealing with the consequences of other peoples' neglect, however, it was good experience for both of the girls.

All that didn't leave much time for wielding a camera, so I stopped on the way home and found this willow herb flower to blip. Because of its abundance at this time of the year it is a good plant to augment the years honey crop, it tends to flower quite late - only stopping when the cold weather starts in the autumn; the last blooms signal the time to remove the honey crop from the hives and to start feeding the bees ready for the winter. There are later sources of nectar, ivy comes to mind; although you may see the occasional bee about but by then, in my experience, it is usually too cold for the honey bees to make much use of it. There is a similar problem in the spring with the early bulbs such as crocus, or even snowdrops, which probably accounts for their need to reproduce asexually.