time in the garden

Due to a busy week planned next week we're having most of this week at home. On Monday we did our usual round of gymnastics, lunch with friends and swimming. At gymnastics Little was very pleased that she won the handstand competition. Small is chuffed that he can still do a backwards roll into straddle stand. They also had loads of fun doing teddy bear rolls with their partners. Little's partner was a girl who had not been before so Little made a new friend there, and Small bonded with his partner over their shared unwillingness to be doing gymnastics that morning. After gymnastics we went to see our friend K and the sprogs spent time dressing up, playing on the climbing frame and kicking a football around her garden. When she went to pick her boys up from school we walked to another friend's house who's cat had a litter of kittens last week so that the kids could peer in to see them. While Little and Small were having their swimming lesson I went and signed them up for a week's intensive lessons during the summer. I hadn't realised that the lessons would stop over the summer holidays, but I hope a week's intensive course might help them both. When we got home Podd had put some pasta on to have with our sausage casserole that I put in the slow cooker that morning.

Yesterday and today have been largely spent the same. Some playing, some gardening, some cooking, some Reading Eggs/Eggspress, some Minecraft. I really love the fact that we can just talk about whatever we want to for as long as we want. Yesterday we caught a bumblebee in our dining room. We trapped it in a cup and then transferred it into a jar so we could see it's features. It had a yellow stripe on its thorax, another on the top of its abdomen and an orange bum. Then today we caught another bumblebee in the living room. This one was very similar except it's stripes were brighter and it had a white bum instead of an orange one. We had a look on www.bumblebeeconservation.org and identified the one we saw yesterday as an Early Bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) and the one we caught today as a White-Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lucorum). This lead to a conversation about how bumblebee nests differ from honey bee nests, and how both are different from lone bees. We also talked about life cycles and what bees need and what they do (which involved a quick recap on pollination and how flowers reproduce), and we then talked about why bees are declining. We agreed to plant more flowers to help the bees, and Little suggested building some bee nest boxes (you can use bird nest boxes or build a bee specific one with an entrance lobby) plus we talked about why we wouldn't be using pesticides on our home grown produce. After that we decided that we wanted to build ourselves a bee hotel as well as a bee nest box. It's actually too late in the year for bumblebees to start nesting - any boxes needed to be in place Jan/Feb kind of time - but we thought we could build it and then save up for a camera so we could watch any nest that got built next year. The bee hotel is used by lone wasps and bees to nest in, but also by other insects to hibernate in over the winter. We'll collect together some pine cones from the tree at the bottom of our garden, and use leftover pallet wood to build them.

Having come to bed this evening I remembered I had tried to take some pictures of the second bee, and had a look at them. Here is the best one:

Upon looking at this picture I've realised that our identification was incorrect. This is actually a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) - you can tell because it has a narrower abdomen and a faint orangey coloured edge to its white bum :)

The kids thought bees could be a good topic for our board so I will see tomorrow if they would like to follow through with that. We are also having company in the form of 2 very good friends tomorrow.