Leaf Cutting Bees...
Saffrons is an older property and one of the artefacts of its history is a large wooden structure (the sort often used as cricket pavilions). I had thought that I would use it as an art studio when we first moved in…
But I hadn’t reckoned on the magnitude of the project that bringing Saffrons into the late 20th century represented.
By the time that we were more or less finished, my desire to hand build and smoke fire pots had passed and the Studio, as we called it, became a repository for outdoor furniture and umbrellas….and lots of redundant art supplies.
It, like everything made of wood at Saffrons, had lots of problems and even more patches of rotten wood, which my husband repaired masterfully with two-part resin filler.
The porch of the Studio, where we sit on summer evenings with a drink admiring the view over the garden in the setting sun, has now been repaired and patched so many times that it is at least one quarter resin…a sort of Forth Bridge of our very own…
Saffrons is an older property and one of the artefacts of its history is a large wooden structure (the sort often used as cricket pavilions). I had thought that I would use it as an art studio when we first moved in…
But I hadn’t reckoned on the magnitude of the project that bringing Saffrons into the late 20th century represented.
By the time that we were more or less finished, my desire to hand build and smoke fire pots had passed and the Studio, as we called it, became a repository for outdoor furniture and umbrellas….and lots of redundant art supplies.
It, like everything made of wood at Saffrons, had lots of problems and even more patches of rotten wood, which my husband repaired masterfully with two-part resin filler.
The porch of the Studio, where we sit on summer evenings with a drink admiring the view over the garden in the setting sun, has now been repaired and patched so many times that it is at least one quarter resin…a sort of Forth Bridge of our very own…
“which are very beneficial indeed, being superlative pollinators”
So, my husband was somewhat dismayed when he discovered, in the rotten wood of one of the porch supports, an area of tiny leaf packages…with sawdust on the railing below…
At first he thought: Carpenter Bee…mmmm, maybe not so nice, as they can be a problem.
But then he did a little more research and discovered that the little leaf packages contained the larvae of Leaf-cutting Bees, which are very beneficial indeed, being superlative pollinators.
So, a quiet recovering of the leaf packages and a delay to the repair of porch supports for this season…
This garden has been, for us, a wonderful portal into Nature and this is one more of our delightful discoveries about the many sorts of bees and other pollinators who live here with us.
