Honeybee Housekeeping

Yesterday we found about 20 honeybees dead in the snow near some hives in Durham City, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that some new catastrophe was befalling these useful insects. But a bit of Googling around beekeepers' web sites suggests that it ain't neccessarily so.

Apparently dead bees are quite common around hives in winter but when they are scattered in the grass and withered leaves they usually pass unnoticed. Opinion seems to be that they are there for two common reasons for this winter mortality. One is that on sunny days, even in the depths of winter, members of the hive remove the corpses of dead bees and dump them some way away, as part of their winter housekeeping. The other possibility is that bees' metabolism ticks over during winter and waste material accumulates in their hind gut, so they occasionally leave the hive on bright days just to defaecate; some don't make it back before the cold gets to them. Given that all of these dead bees were in a few metres of one another, I'd go for the former explanation in this instance.

A Stoat's Christmas Dinner

On Christmas morning, while our dinner was cooking in the oven, we walked out over the local farmland and spotted this stoat, about 100 metres away, racing across the snowy pastures. It soon became clear that ...

.. it was out hunting its Christmas dinner - as the rabbit that it had spotted broke cover. The panic-stricken prey raced towards us, with a head-start of about 30 metres on the the stoat ... 

... but stoats are light, fast movers over snow, bounding across the frozen surface in a series of leaps ... and they are relentless in the chase.

 

As the rabbit approached us its lead was reduced to just a couple of metres and the stoat was almost close enough to pounce.

If you have a sensitive disposition, you may want to surf the web elsewhere at this point.....

The heavy rabbit's fate was sealed when it plunged into the deeper snow drift that had piled up in the lee of the hedge......

 

... allowing the stoat to get close enough to make the fatal leap.

 

After a short struggle the stoat stood over the apparently lifeless body of its victim ...

... and its first thought was to have a good look around, to make sure that nothing was going to take its dinner away.

Then it spotted us....

 

... and instead of running away it wriggled through the snow towards us.....

.... right up to the fence, where it paused to have a good look at us. It's hard to believe that such a cute face belongs to such a deadly hunter.

What happened next was an even bigger surprise, because it hadn't killed the rabbit .... which began to crawl away...

 

... but, quick as a flash, the stoat turned, raced after it and leapt onto its prey again.

 

There was a short struggle and this time there was no mistake....

 

Yellow Holly Berries

Season's Greetings and Best Wishes for 2011 to all readers of this blog

 

These berries, belonging to the yellow cultivar of holly Ilex europaeus 'bacciflava', are the only berries left in my garden after weeks of freezing weather. All the scarlet holly berries disappeared within a week of the first snowfall, along with all the other red berries, but the birds have completely ignored these yellow fruits. As far as I can tell, they haven't eaten a single berry.

Birds' vision is much more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum (bird-pollinated flowers are almost always red) and it's tempting to speculate that these yellow fruits simply aren't visible to the blackbirds and thrushes that stripped all the other berries. But I'm sceptical about so simple an explanation. They quickly find and eat the blueberries that I try to grow in autumn, which reflect light at the short-wave blue end of the spectrum, and yellow berries are much closer to the red end of the spectrum. So maybe there's something else that makes yellow holly berries unappealing to birds, even when they are on the verge of starvation in a winter such as this..........