Hi everyone! First of all welcome to my blog for the next few months. I thought that I would make this first post about where I am currently at with the project and where I would like to go with it!
I am currently waiting to get my car (Big Bee) back from the dealer that I bought it from. There were several un-roadworthy items with it when I purchased it, and so he has to have them fixed, even if it is taking a long time. A good friend of mine came up to Brisbane over the weekend and helped me get a start on making my bed/studio in a drawer in preparation for receiving the car. It certainly feels good to be able to get a start on things! But there is a lot more work to do when I get the vehicle back, work that I wont to have done by mid next week, yikes!
As for where I want to go with the project… Besides everywhere in Australia, I really want to be able to share with everyone the beauty of our bees. We have a pretty amazing bee Fauna in Australia! Like most people, I always just assumed that there were European honeybees (“normal bees”), bumblebees and maybe a few other species. But with an estimated 2,000 different species in Australia alone and over 25,000 species worldwide, I was quite far from the truth!
These bees can be anywhere from a few millimeters to two and a half centimeters long! They can be black, green, blue, red, yellow, purple and who knows what else! They can be fat and furry or skinny and smooth… Essentially, there is a lot more to our bees than many people give them credit for.
They also provide us with an extremely important service: pollination. They pollinate many of our crops and much of the wild vegetation that we enjoy all around Australia and the world!
So why don’t we appreciate them as much as we do many other animals? This is where I come in. I don’t expect that I will be able to have you cuddling bees like you might a cat or a dog. In fact I wouldn’t even recommend it, for you or the bee! But I do want to share with you some examples of our beautiful and diverse native bee fauna and why you should care about them. Even if they don’t know it, they care for you!
James
The Bee log blog 