Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

BUTTERFLIES and bees need fuel too. Here they are, filling up at Cowslip filling station, 1 The Meadow. Away they whizz, tanks full.

Butterflies and bees need fuel too. Here they are, filling up at Cowslip filling station, 1 The Meadow.

Away they whizz, tanks full.

How wonderful not having to pay. Mrs Bumblebee is doing the shopping too. She not only fuels her tiny motor, which I can hear buzzing happily away into the sky, but she has collected small parcels of pollen which the 'garage' gave her as a present for buying fuel.

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She is going to make a cake of pollen and honey and store it in a pot down in her underground house, which is built of moss inside a mouse-hole.

She may have to eat some of this cake if she cannot get out when the weather turns cold and wet. Otherwise, she can feed it to her young bees. Mr Orange-tip Butterfly doesn't bother with the pollen. He just wants the hydrocarbons. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, refined into easily digested molecules '“ not so grand as the big petrol molecules we burn up in our cars.

He is driving around the meadows and woods looking for a wife. This is a tiring business because he may have to travel for seven hours each day all over the place. Then he may have to chase other males away if they come into his neighbourhood.

At last, he sees a female. She does not have gaudy orange flashes on her wings, only black ones. She will have to be chased all over the place, too, and she will have to fill up at the petal station to run her little motor as well.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette June 11