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A little update following on from Monday’s post about the bee activity in the garden.

As the weather has continued mostly dry and warm, and getting drier and warmer, there has been more bee activity in the bamboo, with a number of solitary bees flying and mating. I have also been able to identify the types of bee, with some careful study, and a little helpful confirmation from Damian at Help Save Bees.

Some of the solitary bees currenty active in the garden:

Above: The two pictures on the left are of a female Tawny mining bee, and I think this is the same female who was here at the weekend. Haven’t seen a male so far. The more common of the solitary bees at the moment here is shown in the two pictures on the right, which I captured this morning, resting on one of the roses. It is the Early mining bee.

This bee below is probably another mining bee, Andrena carantonica, which likes to nest under paths and stones, according to this useful website: Garden Safari.

Update: I think it is more likely to be Andrena cineraria, or Ashy mining bee, see this: Information sheet. Some sites mention its bluish tinge, which certainly fits with what I saw. Unfortunately I haven’t seen this bee again.

I think all the solitary bees at the moment are types of mining bee, which make their nests underground. This is a bee I have not seen before in my garden, however this could simply be because I haven’t paid attention! However, I did quite a bit of clearing of some areas a few weekends ago, ready to plant some bee-friendly plants, and the resulting bare patches of earth may have attracted these bees. I can’t imagine I would have missed the tawny mining bee before, as she’s so very brightly coloured. I’m hoping that at least some of them nest in my garden this year. The soil is quite sandy, which I have read that they prefer.

And here below are the Early mining bees mating, captured yesterday in quite windy conditions, so I was very lucky I happened not only to spot this pair, but that the leaves stopped thrashing around long enough to get them more or less in focus:

Above:
1. Female resting on leaf, seems to be depositing pollen from her feet to the leaf.
2. Pollen can be seen on the leaf, meanwhile the male is visible, hovering above.
3. The male, smaller and more slender than the female, lands on the leaf.
4. Male and female together.

Below:
5-7. Mating takes place (in 6, the male is balancing on his wing tips).
8. The scene from slightly further out.

And just a last couple of photos for today, below. I decided to see if I could see any nesting activity for the mining bees, and came across this hole in the soil (possibly one of my least exciting photos!), which is approximately the right size for a mining bee (the diameter of a pencil). However, I didn’t see any bee activity around it, and it could just be, well, a hole of no particular importance! While I was waiting for a bee to turn up, I spotted this wasp collecting nesting material from an old piece of wood.

Since there is such a lot of bee activity this year in the garden I’ve decided to invest in a proper macro lens for my SLR. All these pictures so far have been taken with my compact camera with it’s ‘macro’ setting on. So, hopefully I’ll be getting some better quality shots on here soon.

Update 8th April: This Hairy footed flower bee, below, another solitary bee, on the white dead nettle this afternoon. This bee looks like a black bumblebee, but it darts around very quickly rather than ‘bumbling’. It could see me with the camera and was hiding quite a bit, but managed to get some rather blurred pics. I’ll try to capture it again with the new lens.

Update 12th April: Below: This male Hairy footed flower bee was in the garden today. They move very quickly, and of all the bees I have seen they are the most interested in me, often ‘buzzing’ the camera or my head while I’m trying to take a photo! This one below, was enjoying a quiet moment on an old plastic pot. Below right: you can see his cheeky-looking face, and enormous eyes.

Update 20th April: Below: I’m still not certain whether the hole in the ground had any significance, but since then I have discovered what are definitely the nests of mining bees. A couple are alongside the path (below left), while the majority are in the soil at the edge of some woodruff. I noticed one entrance two days ago, then another couple appeared the next day, and today there are about seven. I think there are at least three bees at work, but there could be more. Unfortunately they seem very sensitive to my crashing around, however quiet I try to be, and so far all I have are photographs of the bees in the entrance to the nests: below centre and right.

I will keep photographing the bees, since I want plenty of material for the bee drawings I’m working on.

All updates to the bee activity will now go in a future blog post, and extra photographs will be on my Bee Photography page.

Also – see the Bee Pages on the right hand menu!

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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I thought I’d update with some news about the bees – both those in the garden, and on my drawing table. However, as this post became quite long in the writing, I have decided to put the new drawings into a separate blog post (coming soon).

Improving the solitary bee houses:

Late last month I decided to improve the site of the solitary bee nests, both enlarging the number and type of nest available, and moving them from the decking, as I think that the vibrations caused by people walking about discouraged the bees last year. Above left I’m drilling holes in the untreated wood, then tidying up with sandpaper. Finally above right is the new site of the nests, sheltered under the roof of an old hedgehog house, and resting on some bricks for stability. Read more about making solitary bee houses in these new sections on the Solitary Bee Houses and Leafcutter Bees.

A tired bumblebee:

Temperatures have been increasing over the past weeks, and bee activity in general increasing with bumblebees and honeybees flying in and out of the garden. I have never been able to get a bumblebee to nest in my garden, so I have to make do with their passing visits. Last week I rescued a buff tailed bumblebee which I found in the house, upside down and appearing quite dead. However, her legs waved weakly when I touched her, and so I righted the bee in a dish and supplied her with sugar water. Above left you see the bee, and the tongue clearly against the glass and white paper of the dish. Centre: the bee rests on some fencing material before finally flying off about twenty minutes after I found her in the house. The bee above right in the fritillary was photographed a few days later – not the same bee, but quite engrossed in what she’s doing!

Some solitary bee activity:

This past Saturday there was a very warm sunny morning and many types of bees could be seen flying above the solitary bee houses, resting occasionally on the bamboo plants, where I managed to photograph a few! It was not an easy task, given that it was quite breezy and the bees were darting around very quickly in between brief rests on the leaves. But even when the bees settled it was difficult to focus on the small bees on the waving bamboo, as you can imagine. A photograph below shows the clump of bamboo which is above the nests – the bees were darting in and out of it most of the day. Click on the thumbnails for more detail.

These are not the Leafcutter bees, who will not make an appearance until early June.

The bee above left was a beautiful red colour, and the centre left shot shows the mouth of this bee, which seems built for rolling mud balls, and so I think this is a red mason bee (update – this is a tawny mining bee, identified from photographs here). Centre right a bluish bee – do you have any idea what it is? I saw both these bees (or perhaps more than one?) a few times during the afternoon. Most common was the bee above right, which was present most of the afternoon, and there seemed to be several of them. I am still finding it quite difficult to identify the various types of bees, despite referring to guides and identification charts and photographs.  There are so many variations of colour and shape, and every species seems to look different from photograph to photograph! I’m still very much learning how to tell one bee from another, so if you can identify any of these bees I’d love you to get in touch – email link is below, or there is a tab above for making comments – thanks in advance!

Other bees, flies and wasps were also enjoying the sunshine. Including this honey bee, below centre, which can be identified by the pollen sacks, and this below right, which I think is a Narcissus fly, doing a very good impression of a bumblebee.

Fabre’s Mason Bees:

Finally, for now, a little note about “The Mason Bees“, by Jean-Henri Fabre, which I spent some time reading last week. It’s a fascinating and engaging read, full of the observations and thoughts of this pioneering entomologist. It really is a series of essays which describe Fabre’s first enounter with the bees while he was a schoolteacher, and a number of his experiments and hypotheses. The entire text can be read in several places online, including here at Project Gutenberg.

An update to this page can be found here: About the bees II.

A post about the bee drawings coming soon!

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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Following on from my previous post on a family tree I drew for a friend, here is one of the sketches I’ve been doing based on my own family tree – click on the thumbnail for a closer look. I’ve used a dip pen for both the handwriting and the little sketches. I used a calligraphy nib for the handwriting, and a Gillot 404 for the sketches. It’s a lot faster than using the Rapidographs, but I’m quite nervous using them at the moment.

The sketches are based on some photographs I took of places connected with my family history. They are both public houses in Belbroughton, Worcestershire – my immediate ‘Farmer’ ancestors were maltsters and publicans. My Farmer cousins also lived in Belbroughton and Halesowen, and were farmers. They lived in various farm houses, most of them still standing, drawings of which I’m also going to include on the family tree when I’ve ‘finished’ researching it. Unfortunately the earliest farm house that I know they lived in up until the 1870s, ‘Howley Grange’ in Halesowen, was demolished to make way for a school. But there is at least one sketch of it in existence that I know of, to attest to its original appearance.

The difficulty will be in knowing when to stop researching and begin work on the finished drawing, knowing that there will always be further information coming to light which may alter the picture.

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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I’ve really enjoyed the research I’ve been carring out on my own family tree for about a year now. So I was excited to be asked to help with some genealogy for a friend, who also wanted a drawing of the family tree to give as a gift. The research I found of course fascinating – it is hard to explain the joy of searching through those pages of census records, and the piecing together of family relationships from birth and marriage certificates. When it came to the drawing itself, I wanted to present the diagram as a ‘real’ tree, with bark and leaf details. I found it quite tricky to arrange all the ancestors in such a small space, and yet have their relationships readable. In the end this fan-shape seemed to work really well, both to present all the family members, while maintaining the overall shape of a gnarled old tree.

Above: Here are some photographs of the tree, to show some details of bark and leaves, as well as the fan arrangement of the entire tree. Click on any of the thumbnails for a closer look, especially of the entire tree, the overall shape of which can’t be seen in the thumbnail. To draw the tree, I first printed the names onto the paper in the fan arrangement, and then drew a border around each name. I then sketched the tree shape around them in pencil, while the final drawing was completed using a Rotring Rapidograph pen.

Above: The finished drawing was mounted and framed. A few weeks after I’d completed the drawing, I was completely surprised to receive a really touching note from the recipient of the tree, who was really happy with the results.

I plan to draw out some of my own trees in the same kind of way now, working on pedigree trees like this, as well as descendant trees, and all kinds of variations. I will also be adding little details such as drawings of places they lived, their houses, perhaps tiny maps, items connected with their trades, and so on. Not all of them will be based on ‘real’ trees, as I am thinking of using perhaps chains for my chain-making ancestors, as well as other ideas. I also want to experiment with dip pens rather than the Rotring pen, and to write the names out by hand.

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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Above is the almost finished lower right hand section of the drawing Dining Room Chair and Window. As you can see there are still some pencilled-in clouds which I’m uncertain about at this moment, and there are more of them in other parts of the drawing. It will be a little while before I decide whether or not to ink in these dark clouds.

Above are some scans taken as this section of the drawing progressed. The landscape is an interpretation of the view from Clee Hill, with Malvern in the distance. As you can see, I was still changing my mind on the shape of some of the clouds quite late in the drawing. However, there is not much room for alterations, as with pen and ink once a mark is made it cannot be gone over and altered to make it lighter. Similarly, I was not sure about the foreground until quite late in the process, and had originally thought of having liverwort creeping into the picture. In the end I decided on these bare floorboards. Click on the thumbnails for a closer view.

And here above are some close-up views of the smaller clouds in this part of the drawing, and of the landscape. They give an idea of the patterns of stipples that I use to build up the image. The entire sky is made up of these stipples, which take a lot of patience and concentration to keep relatively even. It is a method of stippling the sky which I only began doing with this drawing – before this I had been stippling much more randomly. For some reason I find it immensely satisfying to make these patterns. The new drawing, which I’ll post some pictures of soon, includes stippled skies and clouds again, along with the ivy, and some new elements.

Earlier posts describing the progress of this drawing can be found here. They include a post about the photography for this drawing, when I took the dining chair to Clee Hill.

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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Here is the finished sky at the very top of the drawing. And below are progress scans which show the development of the clouds. Click on thumbnails for a closer look.

I think that this drawing is almost finished now, but I will perhaps put some darker clouds lower in the sky before I’m happy with it. I’ll post some updates soon of other areas of the drawing, and when I think it’s complete I’ll post a picture of the entire drawing.

More on stipple drawing.

All earlier posts on this drawing, in which you can see how this area of sky fits into the entire drawing!

I’ve already begun my next drawing, which is considerably smaller, but is almost certain to feature clouds. More updates soon.

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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Above: Lime trees of the Anvil Yard commemorative garden; St. Peter’s Church (originally Cradley Chapel) and churchyard; the Cradley War Memorial.

I always knew my grandmother had been involved in chainmaking in Cradley, but in researching my family tree over recent months I have found that that the making of chains, and before that nails, scythes and other blades, has been in my family for at least five hundred years, and probably well before that.

Last weekend I decided to return to my home town of Cradley, and take some shots of the memorial ground which was once called ‘Anvil Yard’. The tree-bordered and roughly triangular piece of land is one that I’d walked past many times as a child, but it is only in the past year that I’ve learnt what the trees were there to commemorate – a piece of industrial history, and the lives of the people who lived, died and worked there. My great great great grandfather, Tidal Parsons (c. 1806-1882), was a bayonet-striker who lived there in the second half of the nineteenth century, his family amongst many cramped into the tiny houses and workshops ranged around a central yard, and working from morning ’til night in the manufacture by hand of chains and nails.

Above: a few quick sketches of the Anvil Yard commemorative garden.

I’m planning a drawing based on the Anvil Yard, and will be writing more about it in the near future. But for now I feel tongue-tied and in awe of what I’ve found, and will leave it to the words of Robert Harborough Sherard, who visited Cradley in 1896 and witnessed the scene for himself. After describing the conditions in various factories in the town, the employment of girls as young as ten, sweated labour, children and babes in arms at the anvil, Sherard visited Anvil Yard itself, and wrote:

“Of Anvil Yard, with its open sewers and filth and shame, one would rather not write, nor
of the haggard tatterdermalions who there groaned and jumped. In fact I hardly saw them.
The name ‘Anvil Yard’ had set me thinking of some lines of Goethe, in which he deplores the
condition of the people – ‘zwischen dem Ambos und Hammer’ – between the anvil and the
hammer.

“And as these lines went through my head, whilst before my spiritual eyes there passed the
pale procession of the White Slaves of England, I could see nothing but sorrow and hunger
and grime, rags, foul food, open sores and movements incessant, instinctive yet laborious -
an anvil and a hammer ever descending – all vague, and in a mist as yet untinged with red,
a spectacle so hideous that I gladly shut it out, wondering, for my part, what in these
things is right.”

Robert Harborough Sherard, The White Slaves of England, 1898, full text here.

All images ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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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.

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

| Solitary Bee Pages |

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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.

All images and text ©Christine Farmer Please contact me if you wish to use any of the images.

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