What'd I miss while I was reading?

Oh, that. One can be entertained by depictions of drunken prostitution on screen (even while enjoying a bit of red) without actually living the way the entertainment's presented. Makes it even easier when the on-screen dose is limited to a clip of a pre-approved echo. Now for something that's not an infestation in the feed.

Keeping bees for food and pollination is fascinating reading, but depending on the laws in one's location, beehives may or may not be allowed on a residential lot. If they aren't, it's easy enough to make provisions for native bees. (Turns out that that green winged thing coming out of a burrow in the stem of a rose bush wasn't a biting fly after all.)

A block of wood and a drill bit or five, in order to provide different diameters for different bees, is a quick and inexpensive project, and an angled roof with an overhang helps protect from the rain. The recommendations I've read are to angle the bits so that the burrows slope downwards, allowing any water that gets in to flow out. I've broken bits while drilling straight holes, so I'm wary of drilling at an angle, and I wonder if the tools that exist to aid in that make too steep of an angle for the bees.

Once one gets tired of snapping the skinny bits in half, there's also a project involving PVC pipe and bamboo or hollow reeds. Using different diameters to accommodate different bees, along with a pipe cut at an angle to provide the same benefit as a wooden overhang, is another little project with outsized benefits.

Some enterprising person out there's even selling paper tubes for solitary bees, which allows them to have a fresh start for their brood instead of raising them in a previously used hole, reducing the risk of transmitting disease or pests. There's an additional project that involves chilling the tubes to simulate winter, partly to reduce that risk even further and to allow one to observe the development of the bees inside, but that's something for later, I think.

*Before I forget, there are even simpler means of accommodating these guys. Out-of-the-way piles of fallen leaves, or patches of clear ground without mulch or other obstructions, are all that's needed for some types of solitary bees.

It's a relief to have more than Faustian** recommendations to read up on information and advertisements, especially when it looks like the news is going through some form of recycling. Glad to see that red hat kid's doing well, though.

** 5/4/2020 - Correction to Mephistophelian here too.