In the pink?

I have counted over 20 bumblebees at a time on a single plant of chives in our garden. Last night, there were 6 exhausted bees clinging to it, too worked out to fly home to their hives. It has been cool and overcast today, and this bee apparently lacked the energy to fly between flowers.

I have been reading Philip Lymbery's book Farmageddon. Amongst much else, he visits the Central Valley in California which stands as a warning of the calamitous decline of honeybees and bumblebees caused by the intensification of agriculture. Here there are insufficient bees and other insects left to do the work of pollinating the fruit crops and the vast expanse of almond trees. Bee hives are trucked in from all over the US, and the imported honeybees get on with the work of pollination in the short windows of time before the next insecticide spraying. When their work is done there, they are moved on somewhere else - itinerant workers, like so many of the people who help to plant and pick the crops.

I am lucky to live somewhere where there is much habitat that is untreated with pesticides, but even so, many of the grass fields are intensively managed and have precious few flowering plants to feed a bumblebee. Garden plants are an increasingly important oasis in a chemical desert. In our garden in Arnside, we are trying to grow a range of bee-friendly plants that provide a succession of nectar and pollen sources throughout the flying season. There is still more we can do, this is the peak flowering time, and we need to plant more flowers for later in the summer.

On more mundane matters, there's not been too much to distract me from the task of writing the narratives for the exhibition. I'm getting there.