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Blog postMy partner keeps bees. We call them 'the girls' and speak to them regularly. They're a very good tempered bunch, they make delicious coastal honey and give neither us nor the neighbours any trouble, until last Friday.
Brood Box A quick run down on bee keeping. You start with a nucleus containing a queen bee and a small colony of bees to support the queen. These you transfer to a brood box where they construct a network of hexagonal cells in which the queen lays her eggs. T -
Blog postEycott Hill Nature Reserve, Cumbria, UK
Here be volcanoes! OK, Cumbria may not be the first place that comes to mind when considering the volcanic hotspots of the world, but some 460 million years ago this place was on fire. This was the bed of The Iapetus Sea, which was being squished as continents drifted into one another, setting off volcanoes and lava flows all over the place. Between then and now, this has been land, sea and ice at one time or another and pretty well tilted -
Blog postLast month we started looking at the wide diversity of beetles that you are likely to encounter and how they are split into two main sections (Superorders) and then broken down into groups (Infraorders). (See Getting to Know Your Beetles). These infraorders are further subdivided into beetle families, and the first of these that we are going to take a look at is the Rove Beetles.
Superorder POLYPHAGA Infraorder STAPHPYLINIFORMIA Family STAPHYLINIDAE
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Blog postNorthern Cumbria 1900 years ago I live in an old corn mill on the banks of the River Derwent, on the borderline between the town of Cockermouth and the village of Papcastle. A quiet little spot in the north west of England, but it hasn't always been so. Go back one thousand nine hundred years to 122AD, when the first foundation stones of Hadrian's Wall were being laid, and Papcastle was a thriving metropolis, and known, in those days as Derventio. It was a major fort and set
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Blog postOne of my birthday presents earlier this month was a small tome entitled The Corpse Roads of Cumbria by Alan Cleaver and Lesley Park. These paths, in centuries gone by, were used to transport the dead from remote villages to churches with consecrated burial grounds. One such path leads from Workington to St. Peter's at Camerton. Why anyone should want to lug a coffin three and a half miles along the banks of the Derwent to a remote church, when there were perfectly adequate chur
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Blog postOne of Ishbel's Honey Bees, Apis mellifera, pollinating May Blossom on Lowca cliffs
Where better to start this month's almanack than with a picture of a honey bee collecting nectar from May Blossom? May Blossom, Crataegus monogyna, is Britain's native Hawthorn and is associated with the pagan custom of 'Bringing in the May'. On April 31stevening, people would go out to the woods to celebrate through the night, returning in the morning with branches decorated with flowers and -
Blog postCOLEOPTERA (Beetles) About a quarter of all species of animal life on Earth are beetles, and there are getting on for half a million described species of them. That's a lot of beetles to sort out, so how is it done? Basically, by dividing them into smaller and smaller groups. Beetles form the order COLEOPTERA, a name coined by Aristotle about 2,350 years ago, meaning 'sheathed wing'. This refers to the fore wings of beetles which are hardened to protect the hind wings. These hard fore wings a
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Blog postI looked out of my kitchen window the other morning and found this little guy sitting on the inside of the pane. It is a Mayfly, which is a bit misleading as they don't necessarily appear in May and they are not flies. They are, in fact, one of our oldest living flying insects, having originated in the early Carboniferous period, over 300,000,000 years ago. Together with Dragonflies and Damselflies (who came along some fifty million years or more later) they make up a di
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Blog postA couple of miles down river from The Old Corn Mill lies the village of Great Broughton where a footpath leads down to the river. There, you can walk along the banks and then take another footpath back into the village. It's not far, less than a mile, but when I walked it, during the week, I counted no less than 24 different flowers. Here is a sample of them and some notes on their uses.
Flowering Currant (Ribes sanguineum)
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Blog postOne of the great delights of the Spring is the emergence of the butterflies. A moving kaleidoscope of colour amongst the freshly blooming flowers. Down around the Mediterranean you can find Plain Tigers and Swallowtails as well as a host of others.
This is a gallery of the species that I observed in Crete over the many years that I spent there.
Up here in Cumbria, they are beginning to appear too. Some of them have overwintered, like the slightly batte -
Blog postApril is the bonanza month for naturalists in Europe. Everything really starts to happen this month in the northern latitudes, whilst down south, Spring is in full swing. It's impossible to pick out any one item on which to focus, so this month we're going to zoom in on relationships.
As the flowers start to bloom, so the insects emerge. 88% of flowering plant species are pollinated by insects, which includes three quarters of our food crop species. So, this month's first -
Blog postWalking back from town last week, I came across this little fellow, sunning himself on the parapet of Gote Bridge. It's a Zebra Spider, one of the Jumping Spiders from the family Salticidae. It's pretty well camouflaged and I wouldn't have spotted him if he hadn't moved.
They make short, jerking runs when stalking prey, remaining absolutely motionless between runs, like someone playing grandmother's footsteps. Then, when they are in position, they pou -
Blog postSofia, the capital of Bulgaria, is an absolute delight – even in March when the temperature struggles to get above freezing. We were lucky; of the four full days we spent there we had wall-to-wall sunshine for three of them. We spent the first day getting our bearings (as you do) and merely went for a stroll in the park. Actually, a hike through seven of the main parks – Sofia is full of them. We clocked up ten miles. A cool, crisp winter's day with all the usual city birds but
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Blog postBefore my trip to Bulgaria last week, I left you with a picture of a Black Vine Weevil,Otiorhynchus sulcatus, so today, I thought we'd look at weevils in more detail. They are small beetles, usually less than 6mm in length, and they are easily recognisable from their elongated snouts. Most of the 97,000 known species are in the family Curculionidae (the true weevils).
Rhynchophorus ferrugineus
Unfortunately, many of them are pests, boring into s -
Blog postBack in March of last year, I took you on a walk half way along the disused railway line from Keswick to Threlkeld. Sunday was a beautiful day, and so we decided to do the other half, fortifying ourselves with a cup of coffee at a lovely coffee shop in the village beforehand, and beginning below the awe inspiring Sharp Edge of Blencartha, neatly delineated by a line of snow. As we walked down towards the line, evidence of the recent three storms was clearly visible.
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Blog postThere still aren't many insects out and about in Cumbria yet, but the ants are starting to emerge. Love them or loathe them, they are fascinating insects and make interesting 'pets'. A colony of pet ants is called a formicarium. I spotted this Citronella Ant, Lasius sp., (they get their name from the lemony odour they emit when threatened) on a wall, here in Cockermouth.
10 Awesome Ant Facts
Ants are closely related to bees and wasps. -
Blog postSometimes, things are so common that you tend to overlook them, and pass them by without a second thought. For me, the Black-headed Gull is one of those. Seeing this trio in Memorial Gardens during the week prompted me to find out a bit more about them. The only thing that I really knew was that they were not black headed, more of a dark chocolate brown, and that only in the summer. These are still in their winter plumage.
Although resident, their numbers in the UK are -
Blog postLet us clear up a bit of confusion. What, exactly, is a bug? In general terms it is used to denote any minibeast with legs, particularly in American English. To a naturalist, however, a bug is something more specific. Welcome to the Hemipteroid Assemblage. This is an umbrella group of insects containing Lice, Booklice, Thrips and a large group of mainly sap sucking insects called the Hemiptera often referred to as the True Bugs, although this term is also used for the sub
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Blog postMarch is now upon us and one cannot live in the home town of William Wordsworth without making Daffodils the flower of the month for those of us in the north of Europe. The hosts of golden, nodding heads provide a wonderful, uplifting burst of colour after the sombre tones of winter. In the south of Europe, around the Mediterranean, Spring is in full bloom this month. I've recorded no less than 378 different plants in flower during March on Crete (as opposed to 109 here in Cumbr
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Blog postPeople have been asking me about the title of my book; Chubby's Crematorium and Burger bar. Well, here is the answer plus the poem in full. Each of the fourteen main poems in the book is introduced with the story behind it. This is Chubby's Story.
This bit of nonsense was written for Aalst Magazine back in 2001. The magazine launched an international poetry competition, and it was one of those where you were given the title and left to get on with it. The fact that -
Blog postAs the insects are beginning to appear up here in Cumbria, I thought it was about time to bring back Minibeast Monday. You may remember this fellow from the beginning of last month. I said it was the chrysalis of one of the Whites & Sulphurs butterflies (Pieridae family), but we should have to wait until it hatches to see which one. It has now hatched.
I have to admit, I'm not 100% sure whether it's a Large White (Pieris brassicae) or a Small White (Pieris rapae -
Blog postStorm Eunice came and went. Trees were blown down, roofs were ripped off (including part of the O2 arena in London) and, tragically, there was loss of life. At least two drivers were killed by debris falling on their vehicles. My heart goes out to their families and friends. Up here, in Cockermouth, north west Cumbria, for once, we escaped. Yesterday was wet and windy, but that's normal up here. The river level has actually dropped. There is a sprinkling of snow on the local low
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Blog postYou can read this book computerised
Honest, it's not a swindle
It only costs one ninety nine
And it's available on kindle
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Blog postWinds of 90mph, hundreds of homes without power, trees and power lines down and widespread disruption on trains, roads and ferries. So the newspapers tell me. Here at the Old Corn Mill it was a quiet night, a little blowy but nothing special and I woke up this morning to bright sunshine and a feeling of where's Dudley? As you can see, the river level actually dropped a little overnight.
We cannot be too complacent however as storm Eunice is coming over tonight and we ha -
Blog postFollowing our Wet Weekend in Windermere, Monday saw the River Derwent rise to just above its typical high level of 1.5M. We now have two storms coming in back to back, Dudley this afternoon and Eunice on Friday. The north of england is on AMBER ALERT.I'll keep you updated over the next few days for what, I expect, will be rather an exciting time. Not only will there be a lot of rain but the winds are forecast to gust at over 80mph tonight.
A picture may be worth
Titles By Steve Daniels
