Sunday, July 29, 2012

Trim

I noticed a few days ago a scattering of circular leaves had appeared on the decking. It wasn't obvious where they had come from but they did look like they had been carefully cut out by some kind of insect. A quick look around showed no obvious signs of anything that could have remotely caused it. The leaves looked a lot like privet hedge so it definitely didn't come from our garden or even the neighbours.

Jayne came out with a cup of coffee and we sat down on the bench opposite Bunnyopolis. Right at the back of my hearing I detected a feint murmuring, well, not exactly a murmur more of a low buzz. It was coming from the bench, but that's impossible I thought.

Just at that moment a bee flew by carrying a circular leaf. How peculiar.

I flipped the wooden bench upside down only to find that each screw hole had been sealed with a leaf. Looks like we have found our source of geometric leafery. A Leafcutter Bee, normally solitary had decided to set up a small colony by filling each screw hole with a cylinder of finely crafted leaves which at the bottom contained nectar and a small grub. You can see from the above picture that such an incredible amount of skill had gone into the construction of them and seeing as there were six of them it's took some time too.

I had never even heard of such bees, it's amazing to find such things in unexpected places. That night we were also treated to a fine Sun Dog.

A sun dog, also called a mock sun is a atmosphere phenomenon that creates bright spots of light often surrounded by rainbow colours beside the sun. The photo above is not the sun, that's out of shot over to the left, instead what you are left with is the result of light passing through ice crystals called diamond dust at exactly twenty two degrees. This particular one lasted a good ten minutes before finally giving way to a small rainbow coloured patch that slowly faded.

A strange old day.

 

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