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Tree cookie names hanging in the trees and bags ready with Record books and Mission Explore. Looking forward to exploring, discovering, conserving and sharing. There will be lots of fun and excitement, watch this space.

After a wee break abroad (partly spent trying to photograph the very captivating but very fast Hummingbird Hawkmoth) I'm back exploring the National Cycle Network and its wildness. Today I nipped out to NCN1 to do a bumbleebee and butterfly survey and, racing the clouds, saw three butterflies and my first male bumblebee of the season before the rain spatters started. The path wasn't very busy and I noticed for the first time a bumblebee changing the frequency of its buzz as it landed on a bramble flower. As I walked on, I noticed more and more bees doing this. A wee bit of office research on my return....buzz-pollination (or sonication) is when a bumblebee contracts their flight muscles to produce strong vibrations to access tightly-packed pollen on an anther - usually a poricidal anther. Brambles don't have poricidal anthers. What's going on? Having spent too long reading articles from Functional Ecology, the Journal of Insect Behaviour and (ahem) a 1985 edition of the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society, I am not much clearer...time to pick the brains of my friends at Bumblebee Conservation Trust for more learning. What I do know is it's blooming hard to get a clear photo of a vibrating bee....

Was checking the hazel trees around the school grounds today, looks like we may have a bumper wild harvest this year.

Spent yesterday with the Dean rangers at a new nature reserve on the edge of Kilmarnock putting up bird boxes and river dipping.