adventuresinbeeland.com

: Black Oil beetle at Glendurgan gardens, Cornwall Back at home, I joined a Facebook group for British beetles (or for people into British beetles, I expect beetles have better things to do than go on Facebook). The beetle I saw was a female Black oil beetle laying her eggs. The larva develops in the bee burrow until it emerges as an adult oil beetle ready to mate and start the whole cycle again. The charity Buglife have an information sheet on oil beetles which says that the adult black oil beetles prefer Lesser celandine and soft grasses as food plants, but Dandelion and Buttercups may also be important.

The children’s clothes company JoJo Maman Bebe contacted me recently and asked me to write a post about ‘The day in the Life of a Beekeeper‘ – so here it is! I actually did some intense beekeeping prep earlier in the week, by banging together a whopping eleven frames and organising my beekeeping shed. Most of the time taken seemed to involve gingerly rooting around in the spider infested shed trying to find the hammer, nails, foundation and frame parts. A queen buff-tailed bumblebee spent some time investigating a hole in a little stone wall in the garden but decided against it as a nest site.

This week the UK has been enjoying warm air from Africa and the Canary Islands coming our way A record winter temperature of 21.2°C was recorded in Kew Gardens (west London). The little light purple star flower below grows everywhere in my garden. and I have been doing a little work in the garden, with some great help with weeding/toddler distracting from Drew’s family.

Last weekend we sheltered from the lashing rain under the Eden project’s enormous biomes. I had been drawn there by the current exhibition on bees