Cost-benefit

I once went to a talk where the speaker said that he and fellow scientists in Sheffield had fitted trackers to bees and found some travelling almost 13km out of the city to forage on heather moorland. The speaker wondered aloud whether the energy expended on the round trip would be greater than the energy content of the nectar they returned with. Or was it negative food - consuming more energy than it is worth, like lettuce (only kidding!)

The same thought has occurred to me before, and again today, when watching bees working artichokes. The effort expended to dig through the deep, dense thicket of florets to reach the nectaries seems enormous. To reach the next one, which must be only millimeters away, they come back to the surface and burrow down again - the flower is too tightly packed to scramble through horizontally. They keep coming back though - and you can see a second on the way in. In the past, I have seen four or five on one flower

Our own day in the city was all gain for little effort. Gentle gardening, doing fun jobs that brought their own reward. Some sticky plum-stoning, while listening to the English cricket team do their utmost to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Lazy lunch in a favourite café at the cost of a gentle walk across the park. Drop in to the brewery tap to collect some ale. Supper outside, surveying our earlier work with satisfaction. Even bees have quiet days