Hibernating beetles

In a break from the torrential rain last night and this morning, I went out to drag an old wheelie bin to a handy place by the shed. I'm going to store ash in it for use on snow and ice; we've had a few slippery morning days this month and there may be some more yet.

A touch of sparkle from unfocussed raindrops on a window ------->>

The old wheelie bin has lost a wheel so it needed to be propped a bit. It took me a while to find the right stone because ones I picked up all had hibernating beetles under them.

I apologised and put their roofs back in place.

A green brick on a grey day

Let the grey sleety rain from the grey sleety sky do its winter thing. What care we who have green moss?

This green brick works for its keep. Its job is to hold down the lid of the glass recycling bin to prevent it filling with water. At least bottles and jars don't blow out and cause a litter problem!

The moss is Common Tamarisk-moss (Thuidium tamariscum) which, common though it is (and that's very common on the Boggy Brae), is one of my favourites. Sometimes it isn't green:

It grows on wood too

Bonfire Moss

Bonfire Moss

Bonfire Moss (Funaria hygrometrica) looking cheerful made up for the lack of wildflowers in flower that were findable on my #NewYearPlantHunt (see more under that hashtag on Twitter) for the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland (BSBI) on the first two days of the year.

spruce seedling where it's not wanted

In the middle of this bonfire site I discovered another baby spruce tree. Sorry, dude, but you have to go! Norway and Sitka Spruce fans, don't worry, there are gazillions just up the hill. That's why we keep getting seedlings in the Boggy Brae garden, even though The New Sylva claims that Norway Spruce "rarely produces viable seed in Britain". It seems to around here! Judging by the number of Norway Spruce cones I find, I think the seedlings are that species rather than Sitka.







Here is my 2016 New Year Plant Hunt list:
Bramble (just one)
Common Gorse
Common Cat's-ear (2 miserable-looking specimens)
Daisy (1)
Dandelion (1, not in the least bit chirpy like they are in the spring!)

Boggy Brae dandelion from last April

People in southern English counties are finding long lists of New Year flowering wild plants. Here we still have proper winters! It's not so much a temperature thing, though there is that as well of course, as a light thing up here, I reckon.

A New Year walk in search of wild flowers

Reflections in a puddle

Blogger has decided to put what was to have been my last picture in first place. It does this sometimes; no idea why. Since it is today's favourite, I'm leaving it where it is. The beginning of the blog post is below!

The new year began cold enough for a little frost, and hazy.

I decided to go for a wander in search of flowering plants for the New Year Plant Hunt of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI). There is not much in flower here at the moment but what isn't flowering is important too in these recordings.

I found Common Gorse, one bunch of Bramble flowers, and two sorry-looking specimens of Common Cat's-ear.

Common Gorse

Bramble

Common Cat's-ear

In the wooded parts of where I walked, the leaves of Wood Sorrel were noticeable, but no flowers. I saw a few Lesser Celandine plants among the dead bracken; again, no flowers yet.

Leaves of Lesser Celandine
bright green against the bracken

A few haws remain of the hawthorns

Fallen larch twig with holly

Ivy

At the bottom of the field on my way home, I found some dead telegraph poles. A couple of years ago electricity cables were put underground. It has saved the electricity companies having to get teams out in ferocious winter weather to reconnect people's power supplies when the lines got blown down or when trees fell on them. This used to happen a lot. In the first years or so of living here we experienced more power cuts during bad weather than we'd collectively experienced in our entire lives before that.

Wandering back along the lane, I enjoyed reflections and worm casts in puddles. See above!

Chimney Honey

Four years ago today we were collecting sooty honey from the bedroom fireplace above this stove in the front room. In the summer of 2011 a swarm of bees had settled in my bedroom chimney. The fireplace in that room is boarded up and the terracotta chimney has a lid (also terracotta; it's not a separate cowl) but with some side air holes for ventilation. The bees used one of these as their entrance.

At the time, I called a beekeeper friend to ask what to do because hundreds of bees were getting into the house and although I helped as many as I could to get outside again, in the hope that they'd find their way back to the chimney, a lot of them died.  He said that since the swarm was inaccessible it was best to just leave them alone and they would also leave us alone.

After a day or two, the swarm apparently settled down and made a hive, presumably attached to the inside of the chimney. We would hear a lot of buzzing during the day but they'd go quiet at night. And, as Bee Person had said, they stopped coming into the bedroom (by crawling under the skirting boards) and only used the outdoor chimney entrance.

One night some weeks later, I heard a loud 'kerflump' from the chimney just as I was going to sleep.  There was no subsequent buzzing. I thought no more about it until Hogmanay when I found a blob of shiny, sticky stuff on top of the stove and some underneath it. Shining a torch up this chimney, which is 'stoppered' except for the stove flue, I saw that the stuff was dripping not down the chimney but seeping down inside the wall! A taste test confirmed that it was honey and looking at a blob in the microscope confirmed that there were soot particles in it. There was not very much honey in the end but it showed that the bees had made a nest and had begun to make honey before they died.

There's interesting stuff inside the walls of the Boggy Brae house!

Bookshelves and a mantelpiece

During...

After...

Space! partly because I'm putting the books two deep on some shelves and partly because there's a boxload of stuff for Derbyshire Daughter, and we're getting rid of some too.

Stones of wild cherries and a cotton mouse

The plan was to clean the stones of Boggy Brae wild cherries in a hot water solution of sodium percarbonate so that I can make a cherry stone bag to warm up in the microwave oven and stuff into this mouse for a sick child. The photo to the left shows my first experimental batch.

The cotton mouse used to be Toadlet's but I'm going to pass it on to the grandsons.

The cleaning process worked quite well, and inspecting the gnaw marks on the stones where bank voles or wood mice had opened them to take out the kernel was interesting, but some of the stones had a covering of what I think is a black resupinate fungus which I didn't think would be good to have in a warming bag.

I guess my old wild cherry stones from under the soggy dead leaves of monbretia were not quite fresh enough for the purpose. Ah well, I daresay a purchased cherry stone bag, probably made with the stones of cultivated cherries, will work just as well. Or a wheat bag. Or some such.

It's good to see that the wild cherry stones are a useful source of food for some small animals.