Nature Red In Tooth And Claw (Sort Of)

It was a good job that Instanta welder Kirk Harrison was on hand when this swarm of bees turned up on a local allotment. Not content with his love of real ale (he runs the biggest real ale group on Facebook), Kirk has turned his hand to another old English tradition and is now a keen apiarist (he'll be Morris Dancing next). So when the question "Who you gonna call?" rang around the allotment it was a no brainer and Kirk and his bee-keeping mentor answered the call and picked up the lot and put them in a box and they will soon be at home in Kirk's garden in a new hive.



Kirk tells me that they managed to catch every one of the swarm bar one that just didn't want to join his mates.



Here he is with his box of bees.We are looking forward to buying some honey off him in the summer.



And whilst on the topic of nature, it looked like we had had a light cover of snow when I looked into the bike shed here at the factory this morning. There was a layer of downy white.



It turned out to be dandelion seeds blowing in from the nearby feeds. I've seen them drifting past the windows in previous years but I have never seen so many accumulate. I checked it out on the Internet and found on that highly reliable source The Daily Mail's website under the headline "Invasion of the dandelions" that the country is being overrun by them this year and it is down to the very warm weather.Ah,the Daily Mail bless them. They have to report that the country is at risk of being invaded by something every day. If it's not gypsies or illegal immigrants why not dandelions?



I have avoided keeping politics off the blog but now that the dust has settled I hope that things run smoothly for all of us with the new coalition government. With the support of over 59% of the electorate they have to be more representative than any government for some time so we should give them a chance. I quite like the idea of the Torys' more loony views being tempered by the Lib Dems and vice versa, as my own choice of manifesto was a mixture of bits of the two and if we had one of those voting systems where you put candidates in order of choice these would have been my first two.


We went to see Hot Tub Time Machine last night. I was a bit apprehensive as I wasn't sure that this was our sort of film. It turned out to be full of disgustingly bad language, filthy jokes and dreadful eighties music - we loved it! Here's a taster.