On Friday afternoon, I went to London to catch up with some good friends on the sunny South Bank. We try to meet up every two months, but when we finally got together this time, we realised it had been two years! (How?!). We also realised that it was high time we renamed our WhatsApp group, which still referenced ‘Leaving Lockdown’.
When I was walking to Winchester station on my way to catch the train, I saw this pretty cool sight: bees swarming on a lamppost! Shown here with the pedestrian-crossing ‘WAIT’ sign illuminated.
‘Bee patient’, I thought to myself.1
Looking back through my other bee movies (don’t tell me you don’t have some too!), I remembered this one, which I filmed in June 2020, way before ‘leaving lockdown’ seemed likely. I spent many a Saturday afternoon on our ‘balcony the size of a bath tub’ in St Leonards-on-Sea, watching the leaf-cutter bees and trying to capture them in slow motion. This video is one of my favourites, and I love that it records the bee’s motorbike sounds as it makes multiple attempts to manoeuvre its carefully cropped rose leaf into the sandstone ‘garage’.
Watching the video back today, it struck me that it has the same theme: ‘bee patient’.
That seems a good mantra to take into a too-hot-to-work week. May you find time to watch some bees at work instead.
I was going to reverse the video to make it more literally match the punning phrase ‘bee patient’, but I absolutely did not have the patience to do that. Nor was I patient in the filming of it; I scurried away in case of stings, hence the video not lingering for long on the swarm.