Starting Over

Bees are great for the ego. Great, in the sense that they prevent it becoming inflated or over-assertive. They never miss an opportunity to demonstrate the limitations of the beekeeper. In other words, we have lost our first swarm. I've made my way through denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and am on the verge of acceptance

The next step will be to make sure we take advantage of the queen cells she has left behind, get the colony up and running again as fast as possible and try to produce a spare queen, maybe. I also need to check the more distant hives to try to avoid the same result

This is not a bee. It is not even an insect, nor an arachnid, but it is an arthropod. A common woodlouse, but looking not like any woodlouse I have seen before, so I did some rapid self-education

Arthropod is their phylum, but their sub-phylum is crustaceans - they are more closely related to crabs and shrimps than they are to insects or spiders, or even to centipedes and millipedes. Part of their evolutionary history was in water and they still breathe using gills

They have just seven pairs of legs - somehow it seems strange that it is not an even number, we are so used to two, four, six, eight. The photo confirms that number: the two backward-curving appendages at the front (left!) are antennae and the two short ones at the back are not legs but "uropods", which I read help them navigate and may release chemichals to deter predators.

Another thing that caught my eye: in order to excrete excess nitrogen, they do not produse urea, like mammals, or uric acid, like birds, but gaseous ammonia, which they release directly into the air - that must make them pretty smelly in a confined space, but I've never detected it

What is going on in the picture, though, is a woodlouse moulting - shedding its calcium-rich exoskeleton so that it can expand it's body before the soft one underneath hardens. Apparently they moult the back half of their exoskeleton first then, a few days later, the front half, which I assume is what is happening here. Calcium is so precious to them that they will consume the shed layer after wriggling out of it

The behaviour of the metropolitan police during the "pompous parade" - as one of our daughter's neighbours labelled it in their window-sticker - makes it pretty clear how fragile and hollow the British establishment believe the whole edifice to be - fearful that a few hundred republican banners on TV might precipitate a collapse. It's funny watching them trying to wriggle out of it