Filming the bees

Kryzstof the bee man came on his usual weekly visit to check the hives, but accompanied this time by two MA students who are making a film about the relationship between man and bees. They had to wear all the bee protection, as they got very close to the hives to record them.

Getting ready to film 

Grainy picture taken from far away - I'm not getting in too close

Photo of Old Copse hives from Kriss's Instagram account

Kriss inspecting the bees - from Kriss's Instagram account

As ever, Kryzstof wonders what food sources bees find in the wood.  They are clearly finding a lot, but it's not obvious what. The trick is to look up. At this time of the year all the activity is happening on the tree tops, where they are in full sunlight. For example, the wild cherry are blossoming like crazy - but the flowers are hard to see, and even more difficult to photograph on a phone - but the bees love them.

There's some cherry blossom way up there

And of course the wood is full of catkins for the bees to collect pollen from to feed the developing brood. The birch flowers early. The flowering season lasts for several weeks, as the tops of the trees flower first, and the branches in shade bloom a lot later. While birch catkins are full of pollen, they don't provide any nectar, which the bees need to give them the energy to fly.  But as I learned here willow catkins provide both pollen and nectar, which explains why there is so much bee activity in the willows.

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Birch catkins on the ride

The other thing I learned was that the word catkin comes from the old Dutch kat-e-ken, which means 'kitten'. 

Mild winter, early Spring

Looking back over previous posts it seems I write about the appearance of the wild daffodils every year. That's because they are such an obvious sign of the coming Spring. This year they are earlier than ever. The first ones and twos were in bloom on 3rd March, with lots of flowers a week later. In 2016 and 2017 the daffodils weren't in bloom until the third week of March. That's a full two weeks early this year!

Winter was very mild, with only one small scattering of snow and maybe one frost. The result is that the wood does not have the 'flattened' look is usually has at this time of the year. The dead bracken has not been broken down by frost and crushed by snow. As a result the ground layer still has a high covering of dead material, when it's usually bare in early Spring. While offering protection for small mammals, this may mean that other regeneration will struggle for light this year as it will have to fight through this lot - see photo below.

All of this has been making us think about planting for climate change, and trying to decide how best to approach it. There is one school of thought which says that our native trees will adapt, and they will self select; the trees best genetically suited will survive. Other people suggest planting species which come from further south.  We're not planting for timber  - we want to restore our bit of ancient woodland and associated ground flora, so we're wary of introducing non native species, due to the potential effect it might have on the vegetation community.  So one route might be to plant tree types that exist in our woodland community - oaks, beech, rowan, birch, crabapple - but which have non native provenance. So we could look for trees of the same species which are generally grown further south - say in western France.

The danger is of course is that climate change is not just making our weather warmer, but more uncertain. So more southern trees would still have to be able to survive occasional but severe late frosts  - such as the one which killed off a  pot grown walnut we planted the winter before last  This technical paper suggests that planting a mixture of species will act as as an insurance. Which seems like common sense.

I suspect we'll take the cautious route: planting more native broadleaves to make the wood more diverse and trying out a few with non native provenance to see how they get on.