Humblebee

The garden is abuzz. A collection of bumblebees is clambering over the chive flowers - one clump has six on it. Over on the poached egg plants there are solitary bees and hoverflies. My worries about a lack of bees after the storm have been proved redundant. The clumps of flowers (edible and inedible) that I scattered around the garden among the vegetables and fruit are doing their magic and drawing pollinators to the garden.

But of all the pollinators my favourite is the red-tailed bumblebee or as we call it in Gloucestershire the red-arsun. When I was a child I spent many of my summer days at a cottage under Humblebee Wood. It was idyllic, a place of sunshine, adventure and a laughter. It was a place of history with a Roman villa mosaic in a hut in a neraby copse and a Stone Age longbarrow overlooking the valley and it was a place of nature with fossil sea urchins in the fields and of course humblebees. Humblebee is the traditional British name for the bumblebee - humble being an old name for earth and refers to the bees' habit of nesting in holes in the ground.
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So here I am sitting on the garden bench, listening to the bees and remembering.