A Schooner of Science

Photographs from the first day of spring

Written by: Captain Skellett // September 2nd, 2011 // Science at Home

Spring has sprung here in South Australia, bees buzz in the blossoming trees and the air is warm and sweetly scented. So I took my camera for a stroll around my neighbourhood and took some pictures to capture the first day of spring.

Wattle – nothing says Australian spring so much as the smell and sight of these fuzzy yellow coated trees. The picture doesn’t do justice to the sound of all the bees collecting nectar and pollen overhead. Try to imagine the buzzing.

Trees which line a street just around the corner from my house. Gorgeous days like this remind me of a line from Moby Dick, Herman Melville, my favourite book:

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.

In among some rocks, I noticed a colony of ants going nuts! It was queen day, as I like to call it. When young princess ants fly away to start a colony of its own. There were a few drones, fertile male ants with wings who were smaller than the princesses. It was their nuptial flight.

A worker ant helps a princess prepare for a nuptial flight.