Lunchtime Walk round Saughton Park

We're having a sort of staycation week at the moment. I'm working part of the week, Crafty Green Boyfriend is off work all week and when we're together we're decorating and taking local walks. Today at lunchtime, we walked round Saughton Park, where many of the flowers are at their best. 

These poppies (below) are particularly pretty at the moment.

There were quite a lot of Honey Bees around, more than any other species in fact. All the common species of bumblebee (Buff Tailed Bumblebee, White Tailed Bumblebee, Tree Bumblebee, Common Carder and Early Bumblebee) were present in the park, though in very small numbers compared to the Honey Bees. Honey Bees are known to compete with other species of bees and other pollinating insects, and so can sometimes be a problem for biodiversity, regardless of the pollination services they provide. 

I talk a wee bit about insects in my second post over on my new Substack blog. You can read the post here. Some people have been asking about my Substack. Yes, it's another blog, but it isn't just repeating what I post here! I'm using Substack to post longer article style blog posts, once a week, that expand on the types of topics and issues that I write about here. You can read the posts, either by following the links that I share here or on social media, or by subscribing. Currently, subscription is entirely free and most (if not all) the content will always be free, but I will eventually introduce the option of paid subscriptions. However, rather than putting some content behind a paywall, I will probably be using paid subscriptions as an option purely for people who choose to support my work. This is a model that works for a fair number of the substacks that I read, and also works well for various other publications.