Paddock inspections of horses before they race is not an exact science but it helps you choose the animal on which you can loose your money. I don’t really do a bundle on horse racing but I do like the pageantry and colours of the occasion. If the weather’s good it’s an enjoyable summer’s day out. Anyways, late July saw me at Newmarket trying to choose a winner at the parade ground before the 3:30 race. A sign in front of me clearly stated I shouldn’t go any further and should stand well back from the frisky horses. The sign was mounted on a metal pole which was obviously hollow. There was a drilled hole about 8mm wide halfway up the pole which I guess had previously hosted fixings but was no longer in use. As the horses paraded by in all their pent up glory something caught my eye hovering about a foot from my face. It buzzed. I always look at buzzy things. Ever since as a five year old just starting school I was stung by a bee. It’s an automatic self preservation thing. The sound emanated from a bee carrying a rolled-up leaf between its legs. It was a leaf cutter bee. The bee promptly disappeared into the hole in the pole and pulled in the leaf behind it. I fumbled for my phone and was hopelessly slow at opening the camera to get a shot. There are around six species of leaf cutter bee in the UK and I wanted to see which one had taken up residence in this extremely hot metal tube. It returned several times and I never did manage a good enough picture to clarify identity.
We were sat in a hide last week watching a Bittern when another buzzy thing entered my personal space. It was another leaf cutter. I was able to identify this individual as a ‘Patchwork Leaf Cutter Bee’ based on the gingery sticky-out hairs on the underside of the abdomen. A common enough species but a small industrious thing of fascination.
Letter From Norfolk 