Anecdotes and photos of my recent weekend away are coming soon…

For now I hope  you enjoy some photos from my short walk in Wenlock Priory on Easter Tuesday.

I have always loved seeing lichen on stone walls and in churchyards but until I read Katherine Swift’s The Morville Year I had no idea how fascinating it really is:

A lichen consists of not one but two organisms living in symbiosis: a fungus, capable of withstanding extremes of temperature and drought but unable to photosynthesis, and an alga, which – Dalek-like – inhabits the protective structure provided by the fungus and in return manufactures enough food for its own needs and those of the fungus.  Every lichen partnership is unique, and neither partner can survive without the other.

There are some seventeen hundred British lichen.  Many churchyards have well over a hundred, cohabiting on individual gravestones in what lichenologist Dr Vanessa Winchester calls ‘miniature, self maintaining gardens’.   Churches and churchyards are important havens for lichen, even where stone is common, because the churchyard may include gravestones made from different sorts of stone, not necessarily native to the area, each of which will support a different population of lichens.

Lichens are extremely sensitive indicators of environmental pollution: a rich bloom of lichen means clean air.  They also grow infinitesimally slowly – half a millimeter a year is fast – so lichen growth is also an indicator of age.  Many lichen will be as old as the tombstones on which they live.  So don’t scrub them off (it is a misconception that they destroy the stone) but do keep the surrounding undergrowth cut, as lichens need sunlight in order to thrive

So now I know…

Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922)

drop

noun, verb, dropped or dropt, drop·ping.
1. a small quantity of liquid that falls or is produced in a more or less spherical mass; a liquid globule.
2. the quantity of liquid contained in such a globule.
3. a very small quantity of liquid: I’ll have a little more tea, just a drop.
4. a minute quantity of anything: not even a drop of mercy.

For more of this weeks PhotoHunt pictures check out Whistlestop PhotoHunt.

The practice of keeping bees in hives dates back at least as far as the ancient Egyptians.  The summer edition of the National Trust magazine has an interesting  article entitled ‘The Beekeeper’ in which Emma Hill the head gardener for Dunham Massey treats the reader to some interesting facts about bees:

A bee society is predominantly female. There are three castes of bee: the single queen, who lives for five years and lays some 2,000 unfertilised or fertilised eggs a day in summer. The unfertilised ones become drones – stingless males, whose only job is to mate with the queen. The fertilised eggs become the smaller, female worker bees. Their roles include polishing cells with propolis (tree sap), guarding the hive, foraging and removing dead bees – they keep the hive spotless. During summer a hive can have 50,000 workers and a few hundred drones.

Emma has been studying bee behaviour and has observed that:

When their stomachs are full of honey (a worker bee has two stomachs – an extra one for storing honey) they’re happy and emit a low hum. A high-pitched buzz means they’re angry. I know when they’re going to sting me. A worker bee can fly two miles (3km) to collect nectar, pollen, propolis and water. They perform a waggle dance – a figure of eight movement – to show other bees where to farage and their excitement is visible.

Our bee population is threatened by the varroa mite which weakens their immune system. The bee keepers at Dunham Massey are using icing sugar to treat the disease. The sugar is sprinkled onto the bees through a fine mesh, this encourages the bees to groom which in turn removes the mite.