May Day! May Day!

 Yesterday, and I kid you not, a hornet the size of my thumb came into the house. Heavens to Murgatroyd, the NOISE it made as it swanned around like it owned the place. It came into my writing room, which was where I happened to be at the time, and initially I thought it was a massive bumblebee, because there have been some whoppers about this Spring. And then I realised what it was and watched as it settled on the high shelf where I keep my Pilates kit bag. 

Well! I dashed downstairs to collect a wide necked glass and my fly swat so I could capture the beast and release it outside. Lord Malarkey came back upstairs with me to provide a secondary line of defence in case I got stung and went into anaphylactic shock or started swearing too loudly and shocking the neighbours. I climbed on a chair to reach the shelf and my Pilates kit bag…BUT…the hornet had gone! Oh no! With some trepidation, I handed the contents of the shelf, including the bag, down to Lord M, but no sign of the hornet there was. 

Until…it flew out of my Pilates kit bag! It had crawled inside through the gap where I hadn’t quite done up the zip properly.

‘Looking for a nest site,’ said Lord Malarkey, sage and wise. ‘Good job you saw it. Can you imagine it building a nest in your bag, and then it hatching loads more hornets into the house??!!’

I felt he was being rather too enthusiastic about this idea, and besides, the hornet was still marauding the upstairs of Damson Cottage and it needed to be gone, tout de suite. 

By now it was banging itself senseless against the window in the main bedroom, and I feared it might break the glass. Like the Ninja Hornet Wrangler that I am, I whipped open the window and used my pink-fly-swat-in-the-shape-of-a-flower to nudge it back into the great outdoors where it can jolly well stay.

Phew! Of course, I am now on hyper-vigilant hornet watch. A couple of days previously I had taken out a wasp nest that was in the laundry and full of eggs and emerging larvae. I am amazed I hadn’t noticed it being built in the first place and it was a big one, too. Perhaps it was a hornet nest? And the hornet was the mother coming back to check in on her brood? All circumspection, of course, and my over active mind making up wild and fanciful stories, but it’s a possibility. 

Yesterday was May Day or Beltane as I prefer now to call it. I went on a lovely walk along the canal. The weather was beautiful and the canal side looked gorgeous with all the greenery and white blossoms out in full.

There was a shock of yellow amongst it all, in the form of some genista, commonly known as broom. This shrub is, apparently, where the Plantagenet Royal House took their name. Planta Genista. Richard of York adopted the Plantagenet name to show his connection to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, in order to strengthen his claim to the English throne. Geoffrey, so the story goes, used to wear a sprig of genista in his hat! How jolly! 

In the afternoon, I reorganised the greenhouse, having potted on loads of seedlings and space now becoming a premium. I called the wallpaper pasting table into service as piece of secondary greenhouse staging, on account of there being no wallpaper that needs pasting and it might as well be of service in the greenhouse than sitting in the woodshed doing nothing. 

The weather is a little cooler today - we reached 24 degrees C yesterday - but it is still dry and sunny with a bit of a breeze. I have patrolled the grounds of Damson Cottage and can report no hornets in sight.