| Christine | Farmer |

Just a little update to show you what’s happening with the leaf-cutter bees at the moment.

I think the bees are a little later than usual this year, but they have finally been hatching out over the past week. On the left is a bee coming out of its tube, while on the right is a newly-hatched bee resting before it flies away. Now if you are wondering why the tube is sitting there on a plant pot rather than in the usual bee house here’s the reason. There were not as many tubes in total sealed last year as usual (only about ten), and almost half of those had not hatched at all by this week, which seems to me to be very late. So I decided to take a look to see what was happening inside the tubes.

I took a sharp stanley knife and gently scraped away the first few discs of leaves and discovered that one of the tubes had in fact become infected with mites, which you can see in the below left picture. All the bees in that tube had died or never made it to adulthood. I removed these cells by cutting into the cardboard tube. A second tube had a dead bee in its early stages of life in the first cell. I removed this cell and then, in quick succession, the other bees came out. I managed to photograph and video some of this. I think they must have been queueing up to escape and were wondering what was happening ahead in the tube, as usually the bees will spend several minutes resting and cleaning themselves before they come out, but these seemed more than ready to fly away. I have often wondered what happens if the first few bees in the nest die, because it seems to me that the ones back in the tube would never get out.

Another thing I’ve done this year is to remove the paper lining from inside the cardboard tubes, which the bees really don’t like (above centre). Pictures in earlier posts show you the bees clearing these out themselves. I don’t know whether the paper smells oddly or what it is they don’t like about it. I also found that the manufacturers had used glue to attach the paper to the plastic end plugs which seal up the rear of the tubes. So they’ve gone too, and I think the bees will seal the far end of the tubes themselves. So above right you can see what the bee houses look like today.

A result of my fiddling with some of the empty nests allows me to show you some shots of how the cells are put together by the bees. Especially interesting to me was the way they cut two different shapes out of the leaves in order to make their cells: circular pieces to seal the ends of the cell (they use several of these, possibly as many as ten to make a little plug, below right), and a more elongated shape, which they use to form the sides of the cells:

So today I think will see the hatching of the final leaf-cutters for this year, and there is a male already buzzing around the houses waiting to mate, so hopefully I’ll get some nesting this year. Finally, here’s the video. It takes the bee a little while to come out, mainly because I’m thumping around on the decking and it can hear me… and then he comes in close to take a look at me and then flies away: 

More posts about the leaf-cutter bees, including information about their life-history, how to attract them to your garden.

And another great solitary bee blog with masses of information, pictures and videos.

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I was very excited to receive my copy of Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution by Alex Johnson this morning. You may remember my earlier post on setting up the studio in which I described my decision to build a studio in the garden, and this post which shows the studio being built. It is now over a year later and I still couldn’t be happier with my decision, and this book really helps to explain why that is. Until you’ve had the experience of working in a ’shed or shedlike environment’, as Alex describes them, you will not really appreciate the double pleasure of working ‘at home’ and yet in a place dedicated to your particular occupation.

Above: the front cover, and my page in Shedworking, along with the pencil illustration I did for the book.

Shedworking not only introduces us to several famous ‘shedworkers’ from history, including Dickens and Heidegger, but takes us on a tour of many contemporary shed inhabitants from musicians to cheese-makers, and shows us around sheds as diverse in their structure as in their uses; from sleek metal examples to hand-built wooden sheds, taking in barges, yurts, tree-houses and trailers along the way. This really is an absorbing book to get if you’re even thinking about setting up a garden studio; full of places to dream about, alongside helpful, practical tips, a list of suppliers, and information to help you make the move.

Go here to visit Alex Johnson’s Shedworking blog, which has a link to buy the book.

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A few work in progress scans of my current drawing. This time it’s the lower half of the dining room window, with the flowering ivy. If you look closely, there are some honey bees, huge numbers of which come every year to feed on the flowers. If you click the thumbnails you can see close-ups of the drawing.

And here are a few other views and a close-up on the right in which you can see the stipping, and probably also the bees:

Go here to see earlier posts about this drawing, and here to read more about my drawing technique, and stippling and here to read about the Rotring Rapidograph pens I use.

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For latest news, scroll to bottom of post.

I am still wondering whether or not my hedgehog made it through this very hard winter. I know that they generally don’t live very long lives, and that my hedgehog was probably at least two years old, but I am still hopeful of seeing him again. The place where his house is situated is in constant shade, and temperatures there haven’t yet been very high so far this year, but I know that other local people have seen hedgehogs already. I have had a look up the little tunnel leading to his nest a few times and it seems to me that the leaves have moved recently, but I can’t be certain, so today I put a fews pieces of straw across the entrance and I’ll look to see if they have moved tomorrow. I leave him a few raisins and some fresh water out every evening just in case, since hedgehogs are very thirsty as well as hungry when they wake up. The raisins don’t go to waste as the blackbirds soon eat them once morning comes. So, fingers crossed he made it and I’ll see him soon.

In the meantime, I have been reading about the chalk model of a hedgehog which was found some time ago in a child’s grave at Stonehenge. Reports with pictures can be found here and here. The grave has been dated to between 800 B.C. and 20 B.C, and the find has been cited as evidence that people were making toys for their children in these early times. However, I am reminded of the hedgehog models from earlier graves in Greece and elsewhere which do not seem to have been toys at all. They were created out of faience (scroll down for an example here), and pottery (example from the British Museum here), and in some cases formed into vessels which seem to have been used to contain libations or liquid offerings for the dead. The most well-known of these is the vessel from the cemetery at Chalandriani on the Cycladic island of Syros (see images of it here), dated to between 2700 B.C and 2200 B.C. I have had a ‘museum copy’ of this hedgehog for many years on my shelf (click on thumbnails for a closer look):

As you can see, there is a hole within the bowl that the hedgehog is holding, which would have allowed the hollow clay model to be used as a vessel, and I do not think this, or any of the Greek hedgehogs, could be considered to have been a toy. People have speculated on the exact function of these hedgehogs, and even whether the animal in some cases is not a bear. However, I think that this is clearly meant to be a hedgehog from the appearance of the painted pattern along its humped back; a means of representing hedgehog’s spines that can be seen in other representations of this animal in the links above. And the reason that depictions of hedgehogs were placed with the dead? Perhaps the simplest idea is true: that the hedgehog was known to hibernate for many months, appearing dead but re-emerging full of life, an obvious symbol of resurrection, and therefore a perfectly understandable effigy to place in a grave.

More information on British hedgehogs, including how to encourage them to your garden and what to do if you find an injured or sick hedgehog can be found on the website for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society.

Earlier posts about my hedgehog.

Latest news: Update: The hedgehog finally re-appeared on the evenings of 23rd and 24th April when he or she was seen eating a few raisins, and taking some water before heading off down the garden at speed. I did try to get a photograph through the catflap but it didn’t turn out very well and I am always wary of scaring him with the flash. So, unfortunately I have no pictures to show. I haven’t seen him again since then, and I assume he’s either changed his pattern or perhaps gone back to sleep or moved on. I will of course update with any further news. It is amazing to think that he was probably asleep all that time from early November to the end of April – almost half a year. I’m so happy that he made it through the long, hard winter!

Update: I saw him again during the hot weather at the end of May, and managed to get a few new pictures:

Just as a quick P.S., someone wrote to me recently to ask how I was getting on with my Epson printer. I have tried to reply a couple of times but my email has been returned undeliverable. If this is you, please write again perhaps with another email address? I will soon be updating my blog with reports on my printer and scanner, just to bring things up to date.

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As some of you will know, progress on the new drawing has been very slow due to my troubles with a frozen shoulder, which has made work extremely difficult. However, I thought I’d post some of the photographs I have of the most recent work on the dining room chair in the bottom right of the drawing. The picture above is a close-up of the back of the chair, to show the stipple detail of sky and chair. As you can see if you click on the thumbnail, I’m using a kind of pattern in the stipples which gives a nice texture to the sky. The chair is first stippled to give the tone, and then the woodgrain effect is added using small lines made with the Rotring pen. This can be seen in the upright on the far right of the chair back, and in the final picture at the foot of the post.

 Click on the thumbnails for a closer look:

The pencil marks behind the chair are where the clouds will be. I pencil in the parts I want to be light, and stipple around them, removing the pencil and adding ink details later. Below is a photograph of a section of the drawing on the drawing table, which gives some idea of texture and scale. There is also a clue as to what is outside the window, the detail of which will be revealed in a future post.

Follow these link to see the overall design as well as earlier updates on this drawing and reference photographs. And go here to see more drawings in my gallery.

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As I wrote in my earlier post on the hedgehog, he has settled into his new home right outside my back door. While there were a few nights last week when I didn’t see the little fellow and thought he may have gone for his big winter sleep, he has been up and about as much as usual this past weekend. He’s still eating well, and taking new leaves and hay into his home after he has a meal, water, and a bit of a scratch. He takes in the leaves and hay with his mouth and it is fascinating to see him so determined to make his nest so comfortable. Here are a couple of new pictures taken this week:

This is the time of year when all over the country hedgehogs are looking for a cosy pile of wood and leaves in which to rest and hibernate. This unfortunately coincides with Bonfire Night and general garden fires, meaning that there is a great danger every year that hedgehogs are killed and injured in bonfires. But you can take steps to prevent this! If you are building a bonfire in your garden, please remember to stack material in a separate place beforehand, and only build the bonfire on the night you intend to light it. This way any animals who are sheltering in the dry material can escape elsewhere.

If you have time, you could also contact places you know who are organising fires and ask them to take care to preserve these wonderful little creatures. Here’s one example of some of the campaigns to help hedgehogs on bonfire night, which can be replicated at your local bonfire: Guards hired to protect hedgehogs and video here.

If you are interested in creating a hedgehog home in your garden, it’s still not too late, and you will find information on how to do this at the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, and on other websites such as this one I discovered yesterday: Ron’s Hedgehogs, with details here on creating a hedgehog house.

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Yesterday evening I went to hear Richard Hamblyn talking about his book Extraordinary Clouds, in which he presents photographs and descriptions of unusual natural and man-made cloud formations: the ones which did not make his earlier book on cloud classification, The Cloud Book. The talk was part of the Birmingham Book Festival and was introduced by Edward Morris whose book Constable’s Clouds, which examines clouds in art, is unfortunately out of print. Types of cloud covered included enormous lenticular clouds and sonic boom clouds, and the talk was illustrated with some amazing photographs from Hamblyn’s book, including ones taken from inside the eye of Hurricane Katrina, and satellite images of thousands of contrails over areas of the USA, and indeed the theme of man’s impact on the skies was returned to several times during the evening.

Another theme of discussion was that of the depiction of clouds in art, and whether artists such as Turner and Monet painted the actual skies that they ‘saw’, and could their works therefore be used as accurate record of past skies. This was very interesting when considered alongside the decisions Hamblyn told us he had to take regarding the exclusion from the book of photographs which may have been ‘photoshopped’ or with otherwise dubious provenance. Of course anyone who has tried either to draw or photograph clouds will know that what we see up there often doesn’t appear in the same way when it is ‘captured’.

Many interesting visual and other phenomena were discussed alongside clouds during the question-and-answer session, including the Brocken Spectre, in which one sees a solitary figure envelpoped in a kind of rainbow-halo suspended in the air. The phenomena gave rise to a legend mentioned in Confessions of an Opium Eater and elsewhere, and is said to be peculiarly eerie since even if one is standing within a group of people one only sees one ‘spectre’. This is because, as was explained to us, each person creates one’s own spectre in the mind, in the same way as ‘we all create our own rainbows’. At which point Edward Morris pointed out that the entire daytime sky is one large ‘optical effect’ and that we only return to ‘reality’ at night-time, which I found to be a very interesting statement and has had me pondering ever since he said it.

The whole evening was very thought-provoking and interesting and in the absence of photographs of any ‘extraordinary’ clouds, I’m going to illustrate this post with photographs of some of the skies I’ve seen from my studio this past summer, which has been a wonderful one for cloud-watchers like me:

Cloud Appreciation Society 

Clouds in my drawings and photographs

Twenty years ago, when I first started doing the stipple drawings, I didn’t use a magnifier at all, and yet when I began again this year after such a long time, I found myself picking up a magnifying glass: not only had I a greater desire for finer detail, but no doubt my eyes are not what they were. So the first part of my current drawing was done using a hand-held magnifying glass in my left hand, while holding the pen in my right hand. Looking back now I wonder whether this hunching up over detail didn’t contribute to my painful frozen shoulder, but it felt comfortable enough at the time.

Then one of the readers of this blog wrote to me and asked why I didn’t use a magnifying light, and in fact I did have one, but unfortunately it wasn’t suitable for use with this drawing table and in this position in the room as there is no space to the left of the table. Although I used to use the lamp itself way back when I used to do these drawings, I could never get the magnifier into the correct position, even with a special bracket on my old drawing table. Here’s the lamp, which is not only really beautiful, but sits accurately in any position you care to put it in; truly a lovely piece of design and it’s a real shame I can’t use it at the moment. The only real downside to the lamp is that it’s terribly awkward to move around when not in use, and is quite nippy on the fingers! But despite that, I love it and have kept it for many years even when I was not drawing. These days it has a daylight bulb in it and is used for additional lighting at the table:

Recently I decided to purchase a new anglepoise lamp so that I could have my left hand free, and I decided on this one from the ‘daylight’ lamp company. The advantages over my old lamp are that it has a longer reach, which is really what I need, and has a clamp to attach it to the board, making it far more versatile in terms of positioning. The downside is that it’s not as easy to get it to actually stay in position, as it’s head seems a touch too heavy for the rest of it, and so positioning of the clamp is important, and I spend quite a bit of time moving my drawing around rather than the lamp. It did take a few sessions to get used to such a contraption in between me and my drawing, but once I got used to where to position everything, and the alarming size of my fingers under the magnifier, everything became a lot easier:

To follow the progress of this drawing, follow the tag for pen and ink drawings. 

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Last summer (2008) I was very surprised to see a young hedgehog quite happily bumbling around my garden in broad daylight. I was so surprised the first time it happened I didn’t even have time to reach for my camera, but the second time I managed to take a video of him eating some cat food, which I’ll try to post very soon! I saw him once or twice over that summer, and this prompted the purchase of a hedgehog house from the local garden centre (click on pics for larger image):

The instructions said to place some leaves inside the house, but to put plenty of leaves outside, as hedgehogs like to take them inside and arrange things for themselves! The wood didn’t appear to offer much protection against the rain, and so after positioning it, I added some roof slates and bricks. As far as I know the hedgehog spent last winter in this house, but as the branches grew down and it became quite inaccessible to me, I could only judge by the beaten-down appearance of the ground in front of the house, glimpsed by the light of a torch.

Over this past summer I caught sight of the hedgehog a few times; once memorably at dawn when I was again startled by the little fellow rushing out of the gloom and straight towards me. In recent weeks, as the nights have started to draw in, I have again seen him more often, and bought some hedgehog food which he seemed to eat once or twice. But then I started to see him now and then eating the dried cat food that I had left for Tigs, and it became a habit for me to leave him out a little bowl of food near the back door. As a result, he began to make nightly visits and I was able to take these pictures through the cat-flap:

He doesn’t seem to mind the flash, but I try not to take too many in case he gets upset.

Just about a week ago now I noticed that whatever time I was up and about in the middle of the night he would either be eating, or napping in a pile of leaves under the fence not far from the back door. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first, but yes, there he was all snuggled up and having a bit of a rest before coming back for a bit of a wander round the bowls of food and water, and the occasional scratch. In fact it became almost guaranteed that I would see him up to something any time I looked out of the window. He now enjoys a slightly more varied diet of dried hedgehog food, dried cat food, peanuts, sunflower seeds (which he’s not keen on) and his favourite: raisins.

One night last week I sneaked outside while he was napping and managed to get this shot of him, in which you can see him amongst the leaves, with the little shelter of slate I had put up in case he got dripped on:

This past weekend I decided to put up a proper little house for him there, as he seemed to love the spot, and so I bought a slightly different model of house which is igloo-shaped, and of a kind of brushwood on a frame. It seemed to me that this would be cosier for him than the wooden house type. However, the construction is only meant to be a shelter I think, and it advises covering. So as you can see from the pictures below I placed the structure on a little pallet, then surrounded it with bricks and covered it with roofing felt, packing the space between with plenty of straw. I then put a few handfuls of dry leaves inside, and left piles outside for him to take in himself. Then I waited and hoped that he wasn’t too disgusted at what I’d done to his little napping shelter!

Before I went to bed that night I saw him furtling around in the area of the new house, but it wasn’t til the next morning, around half past six, that he was seen taking some leaves into his new home. As usual he was bustling really fast, and it was amazing to see him carrying the leaves in his mouth and rushing inside his igloo! Since then I’ve put several more fresh piles of dry leaves outside, and he’s taken lots inside, so I think he is probably going to make this his winter retreat. I will make sure he’s nice and cosy by adding some fleece to the top once I can get hold of some.

I’ve been trying to get a picture of him carrying leaves, but it’s terribly difficult without disturbing him, even though he’s only about six feet from my back door! I have to poke my little camera through the cat flap, which isn’t the best position to photograph anything. These are the best one’s I’ve managed to date, taken last night while he was carrying leaves into the nest, although admittedly he could be doing anything from the photos (click on them for a slightly better image):

I’ll try to get some better pictures if I can. In the meantime here are some links to places you can find out more information on saving hedgehogs, and buy hedgehog houses:

British Hedgehog Preservation Society including page on making hedgehog houses and lots of other information.

Wiggly Wigglers hedgehog house, although many garden centres have plenty of wildlife habitats for sale, which is where we bought ours.

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Yesterday I went to look at some of the finds from the recently-discovered ‘Staffordshire Hoard’, which are currently on display at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The hoard is Anglo-Saxon in date, around 700 AD., and was discovered just a few months ago on farmland by Terry Herbert, a man using a metal detector. One of the most important archaeological finds of recent years, it is on display for just a few weeks at the museum, so despite a three-hour queue I really felt I had to go and see the exhibition.

Pages from the brief exhibition guide:

The hoard weighed over 5Kg., and comprises over 1,500 gold items mainly related to weaponry, including sword hilts and dagger pommels. However, the five cases of finds on display give more of an impression of a fine jeweller’s than an armoury. Each tiny sparkling item is lit with small spotlights, and some are viewable through magnifying glasses. The workmanship displayed is quite breathtaking, with the finest filigree, inlay work and amazingly detailed zoomorphic and abstract designs. The work is so fine that it is not readily appreciable unless you are really quite up close, which makes one think of the admiration the original owners must have had for this detailed work. The tiny scale of the pieces is not obvious in any of the published photographs I had seen before I made the visit, which are of course enlarged in order to illustrate the designs. However, I’ve now seen some of the videos of the recovery taking place and the scale is much more apparent in these (see link below).

The finds on display, while including some of the well-publicised items – the cross, the Biblical inscription – are only a small percentage of the whole, and I can quite understand the emotional reaction of those who first came into contact with the find. I can only imagine the impact of the entirety, and wonder how it will all look once it is properly cleaned of the Staffordshire earth which clings to most of the pieces. The display continues at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until the 13th October, with special late openings (see previous link for details). I would imagine that the queues are shorter during the week, or if you get there early on a weekend (I arrived after lunch on Sunday).

The Staffordshire Hoard website, which has lots of pictures, information and videos, including this amazing video of pieces being recovered from the soil: BUFAU video.

Staffordshire Hoard Appeal just launched, to help pay for acquisition and care for the hoard.

Update April 2010: The Staffordshire Hoard saved for the nation: The Staffordshire Hoard Website.

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