The Kerr Family Crest.

We had a bee meeting today, the last before the novices' exams next week-end; it was a bit chaotic so I didn't get a chance for any decent pictures. One colony, not one of the club's, was in a desperate plight: all sorts of wing deformities and a drone laying queen to boot. There is deformed wing virus, when the wings growth has been stunted (c.f. thalidomide) and "K" wing virus where the two pairs of wings are each held in the shape of the letter, but we also saw wings being held away from the bodies when they should normally be close against the body and wings perfectly formed other than that they were far too small. These latter two conditions probably won't stop the bees from flying but, they certainly won't help and are new conditions to me, but I put them all down to viruses carried by the varroa mites.
The drone laying phenomenon is due to the sex life of the queen; she mates with a dozen or more drones as a youth, and stores a lifetime supply of sperm in her body. Since drones come from unfertilised eggs, an old queen can run out of sperm and will then produce nothing other than drones. Usually, nothing can be done to retrieve the situation as, by the time it is noticed, the colony will no longer accept a new queen.

The blip is of one of the gate posts (there are no gates) into a new housing estate adjacent to the apiary site; I have other journal entries that have mentioned the sunburst crest of the Kerr family who occupied the Abbey for a few hundred years; the horse is also part of their heraldic symbology but here serves as a song post for what I think is a thrush, I couldn't get a clear enough view of it against the light but can't think what else it might be.

Our film tonight was "Good-bye Mr. Chips," the 1939 version starring Robert Donat. Before seeing the film, I had noticed that the aged Chips bore a distinct resemblance to a children's comic t.v. character from my childhood called Mr. Pastry, a well meaning man whose slap-stick attempts at being helpful always ended up as a disaster. It turns out that Richard Hearne, who played the part, modelled his act on Donat's Chips, as did Clive Dunn in his role as Corporal Jones in the t.v. series "Dad's Army," about the Home Guard. The plot further thickens in that Ronnie Barker, another British comedian, in his radio series from 1971/72 called "Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead," scripted partly by Barker under the pseudonym Gerald Wiley, featured a very poignant but funny sketch based on Chips.