Added Insulation

Although we now have double glazing on all our windows, we don't have shutters on a couple of them. This means that although outside heat doesn't make it into our house, direct sunlight through windows can cause a rapid increase in temperature. This is called solar gain and is not a good thing.

In 2019 I wrote about hanging my old beach towel over the back door, an approach that works well, and which we still use. This still leaves the problem of the windows in the kitchen.

I now have a new approach, which involves aluminium kitchen foil. All you need do is tear off a suitable length of tinfoil, wet the back of it, and apply to the outside of the glass. And that's it. Works superbly, and if you're a little careful you can remove the foil at night and reuse it time and time again. The water tension holds the foil in place in even quite high winds.

Even this slipshod application was massively effective, but by the time I had got outside I had already spent too much time in the heat, and couldn't be bothered making it look good.

Of course, as soon as I worked this out it has cooled down for a couple of days, but I have no doubt I'll be applying it again within a week.

What To Do With a Colony of Bees or Wasps

We have honey bees Apis mellifera living in a crevice between our attic and bedroom, and another colony living above our garage. We have social wasps Vespula sp living in a crevice in the wall above our back door. What are we doing about it? Nothing. And here's why:

The wasps and the bees don't have an amical relationship. When individual bees get old and start staggering around the courtyard the wasps are right there to 'clean up'. But neither wasps nor bees are interested in us, and they rarely venture inside the house. In both cases they installed themselves before we realised what was going on. Then it's too late. Ours is a very typical situation, and luckily in both cases the insects have chosen places where they can just get on with things undisturbed by us. Really the only time social insect colonies need to be moved on or eradicated is when they move into awkward places like chimneys and the space between windows and shutters. Fortunately bumble bees rarely make nest site choices that bring them into conflict with man, but social wasps (paper wasps, 'yellow jackets' and the like), hornets and honey bees quite often do. It doesn't help that people are scared of them, a few people are dangerously allergic to them, and your idea of an awkward place might not coincide with mine.

 

A swarm of Honey Bees moving in to the gap between our bedroom and the attic.

Removing colonies alive is possible, but messy and expensive. Your house insurance might cover it if you are lucky. So most removals are done at the expense of the lives of the insects and they are poisoned before the nest is removed. To do this legally in the case of honey bees you need to establish there is a genuine safety risk for people. A good professional pest controller should mostly refuse to eradicate colonies.

 

My apiarist friend Bernard removing a colony of Honey Bees Apis mellifera (Fr. Abeilles domestiques) from a window.

So now you are asking 'Why remove the nest if the insects are dead?' Well, a colony of dead larvae is an easy target for other predatory insects. An abandoned store of honey is easy work for other honey bees to rob. They don't know it's poisoned, they will be poisoned, and their colony that they take the bounty back to will be poisoned in their turn. It is not legal to contaminate the food chain and so the entire nest needs to be removed to prevent it being robbed.

 

European Wasps Vespula germanica (Fr. Guêpe germanique).

You would be mistaken to think that blocking access to the nest is sufficient to protect the food chain. It's virtually impossible to identify and effectively block all the possible access holes. I know it would be at our place, with its crumbling mortar, decaying timber and worn stone walls. Added to that, with the current cycle of drought and flood the building will move and gaps will appear. Once one bee or wasp has found the free food, the whole of their colony will arrive to collect it within days.

 

One of the wasps preying on an old dying Honey Bee in our courtyard.

For what to do about a swarm of honey bees ie when the colony is out in the open looking for a new home but not yet installed, read my blog post: What to do About a Swarm of Bees.

From There to Here - Preuilly

I was bouncing around the internet last weekend -as you do - and found this photo of Preuilly, taken in about 1912. I spent age looking in the wrong place for our house, but eventually found us.

What surprises me is that today the building is virtually unchanged to 1912. I assumed that the back of the house - now our kitchen and spare bedroom - was a post world war one build, executed when materials were almost impossible to get.

The photo was taken from somewhere near the cluster of evergreen trees on the horizon in this pic.

If you can't find our house, don't panic - it's here, circled in orange.

Another Snow Episode!

 View Sunday morning from our spare bedroom, looking west.

I got up on Sunday morning and was truly astonished to look out the window and see that it had snowed over night. By the time I saw it the drizzling rain had set in for the day, but the snow lasted in patches until lunchtime. So this is the third (or maybe fourth) snow episode of this winter. We've also had 100 ml of rain in the past fortnight and all the rivers are full. The flood meadows along the Indrois, Indre and Creuse all look like lakes. Some roads have been cut and we have a yellow flood warning.

 

View from our attic window, looking north.

A White Christmas

France Météo and social media had been predicting snow for lowland central France for a couple of days. I'd passed the départemental (county) snowplough heading in the opposite direction to me on Tuesday. The weather got very cold and windy on Christmas Eve. 

 

 View from our attic at 9 am.

Simon came to bed at a quarter past midnight on Christmas Eve and said there had been a light dusting. I got up at 8 am on Christmas Day and looked out our bedroom window. It wasn't properly light yet, but I could see enough to be disappointed. The street gutters were lined with snow, but the road surface was bare.

 

Our front courtyard, as photographed by me in my pyjamas at 8 am.

Nevertheless, I checked out the spare bedroom window just in case. This faces west, over our neighbours yard and across a small valley with village houses. Much better! All the roofs were covered in snow, as were our neighbour's cars and lawn. I took several photos then went upstairs to try my luck from the attic.

 

Our backyard at 8 am, with half our recent firewood delivery under a snow covered tarp, waiting for me to stack it in the garage out of the weather.

The local news media are saying that it has been 14 years since we had a white Christmas in the Touraine. That would make it 2011, but looking back on the blog, we made no mention of snow, so I suspect it did not snow in Preuilly on Christmas Day itself. It certainly did snow that year on other dates and close to Christmas. So this year has been my first white Christmas. 

By mid-afternoon all the snow had gone.

The Hover Flies Who Pretend to be Wasps

All summer long, and up until a few weeks ago in November, we've had an active European Wasp Vespula germanica (Fr. Guêpe européenne) above our kitchen ceiling. The entrance is just above the back door and the wasps coming and going occasionally freaked people out. But they never caused us any bother. Nobody got stung. They occasionally found their way inside, from whence they would be evicted by me with one of those cheap wasp and spider catching tools. 

 

Hornet Mimic Hover Fly Volucella zonaria larva on our kitchen light switch, 16 mm long unextended.

The other place they found themselves sometimes was trapped in one of the light fittings. I looked forward to the end of the season when the queen would go into hibernation and all the other occupants would die off. I planned at that point to remove the glass on the light and see if there were any interesting species that had been living alongside the wasps. I was particularly hoping for some Volucella spp. They are a type of hover fly that is known to parasitise wasp nests. And I was not disappointed.

 

The dead insects which had accumulated on the kitchen light fitting.

One day recently we noticed that there was a grub attached to the side of the light switch. Once I'd put my glasses on I could see that it was a Volucella sp larva. So then I needed to identify the species. That was not so easy. Not much is known about them and there aren't that many biodiversity records of them. Based on the information in Graham Rotherhay's guide to hover fly larvae I thought it must be V. pellucens. 

 

 Three female Hornet Mimic Hover Flies found in the light fitting. They vary in size between 16 mm long and 22 mm long, which will be due to the available food during their larval stage.

But then I checked the dead insects in the light fitting. Amongst the wasps there were three Hornet Mimic Hover Fly V. zonaria bodies. The larvae of V. pellucens and V. zonaria are very difficult to tell apart. Nicola Garnham, who has done some work with hover fly larvae, said to me on Facebook that she suspected from the start that my grub was V. zonaria, and it seems her experience with these beasties paid off. The live larva has been safely rehomed to a box in the pantry, and I'll try to raise it to an adult fly. Then we will know for sure. But it seems most likely that it is V. zonaria, especially as that is a species I see in the garden much more often than V. pellucens.

 

 Hornet Mimic Hover Fly larva, rehomed.

Hornet Mimic Hover Flies Volucella zonaria (Fr. Volucelle zonée) are big, colourful, distinctive and impressive flies. At up to 25 mm long they are one of the biggest flies in Europe. With their shiny chestnut thoraxes and orangey yellow abdomens striped with black, they are very striking looking insects. The size and overall appearance of this species is reminiscent of a European Hornet Vespa crabro, but their short antennae and plumper shape mean that they are easy to tell apart once you know how.

 

 Adult female Hornet Mimic Hover Fly on Wild Parsnip Pastinaca sativa in our garden.

You can see the adult flies from May to October, buzzing around pretending to be hornets, and mostly, sipping nectar from flowers. Like most hover flies they are good pollinators. They favour a variety of habitats, from beech and oak woods, to scrub and increasingly even urban parks. 

 

Adult male Hornet Mimic Hover Fly in the grounds of the Chateau de Chaumont sur Loire. 

The larvae are detritivores (ie the clean up squad) in the nests of bees and wasps, as well as predating the hymenopteran (bees and wasps) larvae.