If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!
Everything imaginable is on sale, delicious foods, jigsaws, Cotswold beers, British and French cheeses, hand-crafted items from socks to coasters, picture frames, baskets, and much, much more.
Image 97 – What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.
This is Cirencester’s annual Advent Market, when streets in the centre of the town are closed to traffic for two days and market stalls appear in place of the traffic. Everything imaginable is on sale, delicious foods, jigsaws, Cotswold beers, British and French cheeses, hand-crafted items from socks to coasters, picture frames, baskets, and much, much more. There’s live music and it’s the time of year when the town’s Christmas lights are turned on for the first time.
Donna and I walked into town to see what was happening, we had sausage sandwiches and coffees for lunch at Hugh’s first, then walked around to check out the market stalls.
People love events like this, clearly. It was heaving with far more people than we usually see in town. All ages were represented, people came in from the local villages as well and it was so packed that it was sometimes difficult to see what was on display.
Here’s a short video clip to give you a sense of the atmosphere at the Advent Market. I had to hunt out a less crowded area on the fringe to record this!
When: 30th November 2024 Where: Cirencester Market Place
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!
Is a rose with raindrops on its petals any less beautiful than a rose with dry petals? No, in fact many would say it looks even better with a few raindrops on it.
Image 96 – What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.
Click to enlarge
‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet‘
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Juliet spoke these words of Romeo, his surname was a practical issue between rival families, but she loved him regardless.
Is a rose with raindrops on its petals any less beautiful than a rose with dry petals? No, in fact many would say it looks even better with a few raindrops on it. They emphasise its freshness, and they highlight its apparent fragility while revealing an unexpected robustness.
A rose in the rain is a lovely thing! I hope you like this one; I just had to take a photo. The cultivar is ‘Queen of Sweden’ and it was released in 2004 by David Austin.
When: 8th September 2024 Where: Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire, England
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!
Image 94 – What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.
Announcement – I’m making a few more changes, The image number is moving down so the title can be more relevant to the content, and I’m adding date and place for the image source.
Click to enlarge
The large white butterfly is the bane of vegetable gardeners. The adult females lay their eggs under the leaves of brassica crops – cabbages, cauliflowers, brussels sprouts and more. The caterpillars that hatch out feed voraciously on the plants, and as they grow larger they consume the leaves faster and faster, sometimes leaving just a stalk and nothing for the gardener to harvest.
The adult in the photo is feeding on nectar from a Buddleia inflorescence. Butterflies and bees home in on these. Although the photo’s one of my favourites, it’s technically poor as it’s enlarged from a small part of a shot taken back in September. Still – I like it and I want to share it.
When: 16th September 2024 Where: Hidcote Garden, Gloucestershire, England
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!
The worker honeybee in the photo is collecting pollen. Insect-pollinated plants have slightly sticky pollen that lodges on the bee’s hairy body. Bees visit flowers to collect nectar from the base of the petals, but get dusted with sticky pollen in the process.
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every two days or so.
Click to enlarge
Like all plants and animals, bees are pretty well suited to the actions they need to perform to live and reproduce. That’s what evolution does, it homes in on the best shape and size of wings, the optimum size for flight muscles, best arrangement of hairs on the legs to brush loose pollen towards the pollen sac for collection and transport, the best mouthparts for collecting nectar and so forth.
Quite a challenge, and an astounding achievement, but entirely doable by making small, random changes and selecting the best.
Here’s an example to make that bold claim clearer. If a random change enables the worker bees to carry on just a few days longer in the autumn, the hive will have slightly larger stores of honey for the coming winter. That hive will survive when a hive with less capable workers might not. And that’s enough. The new queens from the surviving hive will carry the altered gene and it’ll be present in the workers of the new colonies those queens create. The altered colonies will also survive in slightly colder places than before so will succeed at slightly higher altitudes and in slightly cooler climates.
The worker honeybee in the photo is collecting pollen. Insect-pollinated plants have slightly sticky pollen that lodges on the bee’s hairy body. Bees visit flowers to collect nectar from the base of the petals, but get dusted with sticky pollen in the process. Bees clean themselves like most insects (you’ve probably seen houseflies doing it, sweeping off particles of dust with one leg while standing on the others). When bees clean themselves, most of the pollen end up stuck together as a lump and lodges on a series of special hairs on the hind legs. Look closely and you can see this bee’s pollen load on its rear leg; an orange/yellow colour. Pollen is protein rich and the bees feed it to the bee pupae in the hive.
The plant feeds the bees nectar for energy and pollen for growing young bees; while the bees move pollen from flower to flower, and often from plant to plant over quite long distances, sometimes a mile or more. So the bees and the plants both benefit, it’s a useful co-operative effort.
Favourites
For convenience, here’s a list of my favourite images:
If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!
Journeys of Heart and Mind 