Lavender Fields of Kent

Lavender fields in Kent

This photograph was taken on a trip to a lavender festival in Kent. Yes, you heard me correctly. A festival of lavender. Definitely one of the more obscure annual jamborees I've attaneded, and I speak as one who's been to the Ely Eel Festival not just once but twice.

The lavender festival offered all kind of purple-flowered fun. There were a wide selection of lavender-based foods to try, including (but not limited to) jams, pickles, ice cream, cakes, cheeses and sausages. Some were definitely leaning to the "weird" rather than the "delicious" end of the food spectrum, but as Heston Blumenthal would (probably) tell you, no-one ever got anywhere by keeping herbaceous plants out of the jampot.

Outside of the kitchen, there were other lavender-themed delights on offer as well, like soaps, perfumes, little pillows stuffed with lavender, massage oil and more. But the best part was the fields and fields of lavender plants, which were absolutely gorgeous, smelled amazing and were crammed with bees. You should know by now that I love taking photographs of bees anyway, but I have to say I think they look best against a purple background. possibly because I think everything looks best against a purple background. I love purple.

End of the Lavender

Another bumblebee picture - again I think it's a red-tailed bumblebee, bombus lapidarius (see the photograph in this previous post) although as it has a golden ruff and is rather smaller, I think it's a male, whereas the other bee was female.

It was really tricky getting this photograph to work, my poor camera was completely baffled as to what it was supposed to be focusing on. I have a few pictures of other bumblebees and honeybees which I took on the same day (the lavender was a real magnet for them) which I might put up at some point - this isn't actually the best of them in terms of focus, but I particularly like the colours and the last few bedraggled looking flowers.

There's a lavender farm quite close to where I grew up, and it's absolutely beautiful at the height of summer, particularly if, like me, you fanatically love anything purple-coloured. Plus, it smells fantastic.

Balancing Act

I believe this is a european honeybee, aka apis mellifera, although I'm not entirely sure. I hope it is, because honeybees are nice. For one thing, they make honey, and honey with butter on toast is one of my favourite breakfasts (second only to toasted cinammon fruit bread. And ice cream, except obviously I don't actually allow myself to have that for breakfast because I don't want to turn entirely spherical). For another, they pollinate things in a useful and civic-minded manner. What's not to like?

And of course the poor honeybees are suffering from colony collapse disorder, which seems to me a rather ridiculous name, but there you go. No-one knows why the bees are disappearing, and it probably doesn't help that, bizarrely, there is genuinely a booming black market for bees, with thefts happening all over the place. On the one hand, it shows that British criminals are displaying an impressive level of knowledge and expertise in the field of beekeeping, which can only be admired.
On the other hand, they're stealing all the bees.

Upside Down

Another bumblebee! I do love them. It's funny - if a bee comes up to me while I'm sitting eating or reading or whatever, I tend to run away from them for fear of being stung, but I'm quite happy to get really close to take pictures when they're in amongst the flowers. I feel much more comfortable about them then - I know they're a lot more interested in the flowers than in me.

I wanted to identify this bee for the blog, but sadly I have been thwarted. I think I can say with reasonable confidence that it is either a bombus terrestris (buff-tailed bumblebee) or a bombus lucorum (white-tailed bumblebee), but alas it turns out that the workers of these two species are virtually indistinguishable except through dissection. Damn it! Better start carrying a scalpel as well as a camera...

For my sister's birthday, I bought her a bumblebee bracelet from Swarovski. She was debating what name to call it, and settled on Albus - like Albus Dumbledore, dumbledore being an archaic dialectical word for a bumblebee. Rather a cunning name, I thought! Apparently, the word bumblebee was preceeded by the phrase "humble bee" which Wikipedia tells me was first used in 1450 in Fysshynge wyth Angle, "In Juyll the greshop & the humbylbee in the medow." I rather like it.

Red Tailed Bumblebee

Bombus lapidarius, the red-tailed bumblebee. Or at least, I looked through an identification guide to British bees, and that's what I came up with.

The word "bombus", the genus name for bumblebees, apparently comes from the Latin word for "booming". Which frankly I think is something of an exagerration. Bloody Romans.