The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3309 by Angharad Copyright© 2021 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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I woke up feeling chilly and realised I'd somehow wriggled out from under the duvet which was covering more of the floor than the bed. It was four o'clock and still dark. I went to the loo and tidied up the bed before climbing back into it. I missed Simon and almost felt like calling him but if he was asleep, it would disturb him and he didn't need that. I tossed and turned for half an hour before pulling on a dressing gown and going downstairs to make some tea.

It was unusual for Si not to tell me if he had meetings or other commitments in the evenings while he was away. We chatted most days but he said he'd be very busy for the next couple of days, as was I, so I left him in peace and quiet. I mean the last thing he needs is a weak and needy woman pestering him, especially as he thinks I'm stronger than he is. If I am, it's only on a bicycle and I hadn't done any of that for ages, god it's going to hurt next time I do ride one, everything from my bum to my legs are going to hurt.

The kettle boiled and I made myself a cuppa, added a splash of milk and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. I'd brought my mobile with me, though I wasn't sure why, however, I checked it for messages. There were none. I sighed and as I sipped my tea caught sight of movement. Danni strolled into the kitchen, "What are you doing up?" we almost asked in synchrony of each other.

I pulled rank, "So, young lady, what are you doing up?" I repeated my question.

"Had a horrible dream, what's your excuse?" she threw back at me.

"Missing your dad, decided I'd have a cuppa. What happened in your dream?"

"Oh it was back in France and I ran into one of the guys who attacked us in the toilets."

"Oh, sweetheart," I opened my arms and she came and perched on my lap. I cuddled her and she snuggled into me.

"It's funny because I was a girl in my dream, but I was just as scared of him..." She shuddered and I realised she was silently weeping.

"Hey, come on, they can't hurt you, they were killed by French police, I saw the fire-fight, it wasn't nice but they didn't escape, I saw that."

"I know, Mummy, but every now and again I dream about it or what Pia did to me, or what my Uncle did to me when I was a kid. Sometimes I think I'm really fucked up, will I ever get to live a normal life?"

"Let me make you an appointment with Stephanie, talk it through with her as she can help you more than I can in dealing with these dreams."

"Yeah, okay," she sighed and sniffed at the same time and ended up coughing which woke the cat up and she then jumped up on Danni's lap and rubbed against her. That in itself was unusual, usually, she wakes as soon as the refrigerator door is opened, the cat, that is, not Danni. Danni sat and stroked her for a few moments. "If I come into bed with you, Mummy, I won't get nasty dreams and you won't feel lonely."

I glanced at the kitchen clock, a huge, great wall clock thing that Tom claimed was a family heirloom, I wasn't convinced as I've seen similar ones for sale at car boot sales. "Come on then, we might get a couple of hours."

I emptied my tea down the sink and rinsed the cup, then followed Danielle and that bloody cat up to my bedroom. I spooned around Danni and she was shaped around the cat who was purring like a manic Geiger counter. Amazingly, we all went off to sleep until the alarm went off at seven. I can't say I felt refreshed but I had had a bit more sleep than if I'd been on my own.

Danielle yawned as I got up to go and wee and then shower. When I came back she'd gone back to sleep and I had to rouse her and send her off to shower in her own bathroom. After dressing I woke the others and they grumbled as they got out of their warm beds into the cool morning air. "C'mon rise and shine, it's Friday so just one more day in school." They didn't seem persuaded by my comments and grumbled their way into the bathroom while I did my hair and then went down to the kitchen to start the marathon of breakfast making.

Tom was already back from his dog walking and Kiki was wolfing down her breakfast. I fed Bramble then put the kettle on and started loading the toaster with slices of wholemeal bread. Danni was next down and she began buttering the bread, nabbing a couple of slices while I refilled the toaster. In between I grabbed packets of cereal and dishes, then with a six-pint bottle of milk on the table, the younger girls came down and began helping themselves to breakfast. I mashed up a banana and spread it on my toast and sat down to eat it. Danni helped Lizzie with her breakfast and half an hour later we were all getting ourselves ready to go off to work or school.

I once had the thought that all of us were going off to places of education but Tom and I were the only ones who didn't seem to learn anything. Actually, that wasn't quite true, I had to supervise a doctoral student who was doing a project on bees, the solitary variety.

For those of you who aren't into insects, bees in the UK are roughly dividable into three or four groups, hive bees, bumblebees and solitary bees. There is one kind of hive bee, twenty four bumblebees and over two hundred solitary bees. The first two groups are social bees the solitary ones aren't so effectively they make their own nest, lay their eggs with a food store and die. They never see their young. These are bees like leaf cutters, which nest in holes in sticks or sometimes bee hotels - the artificial nests that people put up in their gardens with bits of bamboo or reed stalks, or even paper straws, in them. The nests are cells divided by bits of leaf that have been cut out from various plants, which are provisioned with a ball of pollen and an egg is laid in them, then another cell is formed and the same done again, In a suitable hole, there maybe half a dozen of more cells laid and then sealed with more chewed up leaf.

Solitary bees probably pollinate more than any other group of bees, even bumblebees and they do more pollination than hive bees, which are lazy by comparison. Hive or honeybees and bumblebees add saliva to the pollen they collect to make it stick to their pollen baskets or corbiculae, while the solitary bees don't, they collect pollen on their hind legs which have special bristles for the job, or they have hairs under their abdomen which they rub on flowers to collect the pollen. Because the pollen is loose, not being stuck together with bee spit, it tends to drop off into subsequent flowers and fertilises them. Apparently, one solitary bee does as much pollinating as a hundred and twenty hive bees.

There are parasitic bees, wasps and other predators that try to lay their own eggs in the nests of the pollinators or actively rob them and there are arguments that providing bee nest sites creates opportunities for parasites and predators but the jury is still out on that, so I can't say if I agree with it or not.

What my student is doing is creating areas for mining bees, which nest in holes in sandy soils, in a couple of nature reserves, including the one Dan manages from the Billie King visitor centre. He's also doing them at one or two farms that are planning to grow various crops that require insect pollination like linseed. What we've got the farmers to agree to is to build banks or leave a patch of bare earth for the bees to colonise in their fields, both on the margins and in the middle of large fields. Melanie, my doctoral student, will be counting the numbers of nests, the numbers of parasites and other predators.

The farmers are paid for their cooperation and for using their plant for creating the nesting areas. One of my master's students is doing a similar project with bee hotels which are being left on south-facing walls at a number of different sites of different sorts, including the nature reserve and one or two big gardens, including the university campus and the city hall.

Quite how I got involved was simply because the person who was going to supervise, and who is an entomologist, left on long term sick after contracting long Covid. They've been ill for nearly a year and at times can hardly breathe. So I agreed to do most of the supervision if they agreed to do the identification of insects bit, which they thought they could manage from home, my students taking things to them. It isn't ideal, but I think we can make it work and certainly, my colleague, Dr Cynthia Cardui, was upset to be so ill all the time because she really does enjoy her supervisory role. In return, we've temporarily employed someone to teach her courses, which are, strangely enough, on insects. I can do some basic stuff but I'm essentially a mammal ecologist these days, when I get to do any practical stuff that is, and now I shall become more versed in bee ecology than I was before. All good fun.

So perhaps I was wrong when I said Tom and I didn't learn anything these days, because in recent months I've learned quite a lot about various bees, I've also had the children putting up bee hotels in various places in the garden and we even experimented with which direction they faced, finding that it's true that south or east-facing ones do best. Bees, like all insects are exothermic and require heat from the sun to really get going, bumblebees, for which I have a soft spot, are able to warm themselves up by disengaging their wings from their flight muscles, which I believe I read some other bees can do as well, but possibly not solitary bees.

We see bees as intelligent insects because they communicate with each other, in the social ones, that is, to share information on best nectar or pollen sites which in hive bees they do with a dance. I think probably most creatures are cleverer than we think. If you clear snails out of your garden by dumping them a hundred or so metres from where they were eating you flowers or veg, they turn up again within a day or two, showing that they can navigate. Experiments have been done to prove it by marking the snails and detailing where they were found and where they were transferred so it was possible to see which ones had returned.

We don't use insecticides in our garden, both Tom and I are agreed on that, he does go on slug and snail culls every so often, usually with pit fall traps baited with beer into which the unwitting mollusc falls and drowns, which perhaps demonstrates the dangers of drink. I wonder if there are any teetotal molluscs?

It was with silly notions like teetotal slugs that I drove off to work. David takes and collects the girls to school and does any shopping we need for food while he's out. He uses the VW minibus thing and the arrangement seems to work. If he's away or unavailable then I drive them, but it wastes up to half an hour at each end of the working day and I can do quite a lot in an hour, it also means I tend to work later when he does the school run.

Getting the grants for the bee projects that my students were doing was a fiddle and probably more a case of who I knew, or Tom knew that we could tap for the money. In both cases it was Natural England who agreed to pay costs for up to three years. They weren't enormous by some research standards but still ran into thousands each year, mostly to pay farmers for their bit, building banks or leaving bare earth for the ground nesting bees to use. But compared to the scale they do it in the US, we are real small fry. Over there, they use solitary bees which they call alkali bees to pollinate alfalfa, the bees have to open the flowers to pollinate them and although hive bees are sometimes used as well or instead, hive bees don't like visiting the plants because they get slapped in the face by plants as they try to reach the nectar or pollen. Apparently, the alkali bees don't and farmers who use these bees, which are essentially wild, clear acres of ground for them to nest, they are ground nesters, but then they have large areas under cultivation so need it.

"You have a lunch appointment with the VC and a meeting in quarter of an hour."

"Do I? With who?"

"Peter Dominic."

"Who's he when he's around?"

"It's your handwriting professor, so you should know, but you've blanked out an hour for it."

It was more than my diary I'd blanked, my mind went with it and I had no idea who he was or when I'd made the appointment. "Are you sure I wrote it?" I queried.

"Well it's a messy scrawl and my writing is quite neat as you know, or compared to yours it is."

One of these I'll have to kill her, I can't just sack her she knows too much, "Never mind the insults, minion, make the bloody tea." So started another day in the life of an overworked public servant and her wage slave.