Better safe

In some cases, the job you do makes a difference to your car insurance premium. Public servant, police, teacher good; delivery driver, builder, abbatoir worker(!) bad. Boring old 'retired' somewhere in the middle I suppose. Next time I do it, I want to try pretending I'm a 'batologist', to see what that gets me. It's not what you think: someone who studies bats is a 'chiropterologist'; a batologist studies brambles! (It's all Greek to me) 

I started poking about the Internet because I'm confused and disappointed that the brambles lining the Birmingham rivers have been in flower for weeks, those along the Thames yesterday were blooming prodigiously, but the ones on the south-facing hedge beside the village hive look like this. Well, most of them do - walking its length, I found a very few tiny areas where flowers have bloomed and berries are already present, but the vast majority are clearly a week or two away

I started getting vague memories of their being more than one species. Now I know that there are in fact hundreds of 'micro-species' - genetically different plants that are not distinct enough (genetically or physically) to call them truly separate species. Some of them have double the number of chromosomes; some have three sets, but it doesn't seem to change them much - even botanists have trouble telling them apart. I couldn't find any confirmation that different micro-species may flower at different times, but that's my working hypothesis

Whatever the reason, I decided I can't rely on brambles coming up with much nectar in the near future. The sick bees are much better but, while affected by the virus, they didn't make much honey, and they have now run out. I fed them sugar solution to fill the hungry gap for which June is notorious, just as an insurance