Sometimes you go for a walk and you see sunflowers and bees. The bees love the sunflowers and sometimes the volume of bees is so great that you can hear a swarm, or even many swarms of them. Each one picks up a little nectar before moving on to the next.
I don’t know whether they have a honey made just from sunflowers, like they do from lavender or other plants.
Most people go and take pictures from the front rather than from the back of sunflowers. I like to be different because it’s more interesting. Taking pictures from the front is easy now. All phone makers have made it easy.
It’s good to do things differently and to stay creative. I took this during the daily bike ride.
They often announce rain and storms and we often get very little of either. The weather here is dry. The little rain that did fall was sandy. Farmers have harvested their crops but so far the rain is not worrying.
Grains in a hand, found on the road.
According to my watch, and farmers, a storm is coming. That’s why they are busy trying to harvest all the grain before it hits.
At this time of year you can watch the combine harvesters harvesting all the fields and collecting grain. You can then see tractors following up and gathering what they leave on the fields and making plenty of bails.
View of La Dole and the limestone rock.
Today I woke up and instead of cycling up to see this view and have a meal I decided to do the opposite. I would walk down. Two or three summers ago I walked up and they took four or five hours. Walking down is much easier.
One or two bits are steep and my shoes lost traction. It wasn’t serious or life threatening.
A road between green trees.
When the weather is good and there is no wind it makes sense to go for a bike ride. The roads were quiet for the most part but a few cars still passed too close and too fast. The challenge is to find the quietest, least dangerous route.
I am still looking for a route where I never feel in danger. For now I find routes where I am comfortable, for the most part.
The view is not as good as sometimes. A few clouds but with the haze hiding the Alps today.
I have seen combine harvesters at work over the last two days. Yesterday I saw them harvesting colza, and today I saw them harvesting wheat. At the moment you see grapes that are still in a juvenile state, and apples that look a little more mature, growing on their respective plants.
Apples on an Apple tree
When you walk every single day of the year, you see nature change. You see plants flower, the fruit or nuts grow, the harvest, and then the next crop, You see this all year long.
During a pandemic it makes sense to go to the mountains and it makes sense to walk where you have space to the left and right to keep social distancing. Today I saw the cows near St Cergue and they were all sitting and relaxing, chewing the cud, waiting for the tourist day to open.
I haven’t been to the mountains much over the last four years because of the pandemic, a broken arm and for one summer no car.
There is an article on Swiss Radio and Television that discusses the positive impact that the flooding has had on the water tables. For several years not only have we had warm weather but we have also gone with very little or no rain for months at a time.
During some weeks we were told “The water reserves are so low that we will soon need to switch to retrieving water from the lake rather than our reservoires.