[cloddopper]

Most of th ivy on next doors shrubs & trees has gone into over dive zillions of light khaki green 2" golf ball type clusters of it everywhere .

 If it stays sunny & warmish ( 12 oC plus )  in the next few days expect an invasion of honey bees & wasps all over it .

 Ivy pollen & honey  is slightly toxic enough to give some people bad headaches and diarrhea .  So my advice to anyone who is thinking of sneaking off with the bees winter stores is ..... don't do it , you may get more than you bargained for  . 

 Now is also the  about the latest time you can fed 1:1 sugar syrup with out thymol in it as a sudden cold snap will leave the uncapped sugar with too much water in it and thus liable to grow mould spores

[Carse Goodlifers]

The ivy next to our bins has been out in flower for a good fortnight now and is now tailing off.
Looks like plenty berries for the c_____mas dec's.
Bee's are shut up for the winter now - mouse guards on, door blockers in.
Been reasonably cold up here this past 10 days - notice a big drop off in bumble numbers and also wasps too.

[cloddopper]

Today I've been out in the garden in jeans & a tee shirt from  10.00 till 15.30 ( ish )   It was lovely & warm so long as I was in the sunshine .   I watched a wasp land on the fence a fw inches from my head and start scraping  off fibres. 

Wallop " an ex wasp fell to the floor .
 We still have plenty of bumble bees visiting the half a dozen or so fuchsia shrubs we have in the front gardens .
 All the grapes on the eight year old vine that's wired to a south facing wall have now fully ripened .
Delicious black ones,  quite big and so sweet,  I sat a while and ate a bunch of them straight off the vine. Unfortunately the wasps like them too so I had to be very careful as to how I got them and ate them .

I didn't manage to get hold of the seedless varieties so ended up spraying the gardens with plenty of unwanted grape seeds .