Summer: Sight
Somewhere in Southeast London this week, a bee landed on a flower blazing with ultraviolet lights invisible to every human walking past.
Welcome to the first episode of my Summer series, which this week will focus on our precious sense of sight.
Coming at a rate of about once a fortnight, future episodes in Summer will touch on our senses of hearing, smell, taste and, well, touch.
I’ll also be releasing a special Summer Solstice edition featuring a top secret supersense to celebrate the longest day of the year.
But today: the eyes have it.
This week I mistook rosemary for lavender. Again.
(Luckily not in front of clients. And I wasn’t telling anyone to eat anything.)
What I saw was a Mediterranean-looking shrub with narrow silvery leaves, woody stems and purple flower petals.
I combined that observation with the context, a raised bed in a park, and with my dangerously minimal knowledge that there are a lot of species of lavender (true — 47 at last count) and some of them look a bit different to your classic English Lavender (okay, not that different).
All this led me to exclaim to a prospective business partner: ‘Lovely lot of lavender there!’
Very politely my future colleague murmured, ‘That’s rosemary’, and I styled it out by pretending I meant the bush next to the one we were looking at.
Also not lavender.
My baby son would never have made this mistake.
At seven months old, what he sees is shimmering grey-green movement, dancing vertical purple shapes, flickering sunlight, waving textures and shifting shadows.
No individuation, no labelling of this and that. One continuous image.
Who’s to say which is the more valid observation?
I’ll tell you who else wouldn’t have seen what I saw: bees.
OMG Bees See Invisible Patterns
Behold the humble dandelion!
On the right: what a human sees — monochrome yellow.
On the left: what a bee sees — an ultraviolet bull’s eye.
Flowers were never really made for us. We’re accidental spectators. They evolved in synchrony with the insects that pollinate and propagate them.
The human-vision yellow of the dandelion doesn’t reveal anything to us about its internal workings.
The bee-vision bull’s eye on a white background shows the bee exactly where to forage for nectar, and helps the plant pass on its pollen for the next generation.
Entire conversations are happening in colours we never evolved to perceive.
If you want to see loads more amazing examples of what a bee sees, head over to Bjørn Rørslett’s crazy site. Ten minutes of wow.
Your Turn: Watch Pollinators Visiting Flowers For Five Uninterrupted Minutes
How often do you actually sit still and observe something in nature?
Probably not very often unless it’s something really awesome like a solar eclipse or an golden eagle getting mobbed by crows.
The last time it happened for me was on holiday in Spain last week.
We stood in awe watching literally hundreds of butterflies gorging themselves on the nectar of a bougainvillea.
Every time we moved, the bush exploded with startled Red Admirals.
Awesome.
But I didn’t have to go all the way to Spain for this kind of magical experience — it’s right on my doorstep.
All summer long, bees, butterflies and hoverflies flit around the pots piled up on our path. (Embarrassingly enough, they love our rosemary.)
This week’s practice is to watch your local pollinators at work for five uninterrupted minutes.
Don’t get out your phone or camera. Just watch. Five minutes. You can take pictures after.
Find a patch of flowers. They don’t have to be big and flashy. Try hedgerows, your local park, street trees, or even those stubborn ‘little yellas’ that grow through the cracks of a wall in an abandoned corner of town.
Stand or sit still for five minutes and watch the pollinators at work.
Notice what you’re seeing. What does what we call a ‘bee’ or a ‘wasp’ actually look like? Can you tell one individual from another? What flowers do they choose? Does their foraging follow a pattern?
At first you’ll think nothing much is happening.
If you get distracted, you’re right — this is boring. So don’t worry. Just gently bring yourself back to the pollinators and you’ll start to notice.
One bee becomes three.
A hoverfly appears motionless in mid-air.
A small white butterfly drifts through like ash.
Suddenly the patch of flowers is not decoration but infrastructure. An airport. A marketplace. A living system vibrating at the edge of your attention all along.
If you were a pollinator, these would be your favourite conditions:
Late morning to early afternoon.
Warm — insect pollinators tend to be cold-blooded and need to warm up before they can fly.
No more than a gentle breeze. Air traffic is grounded in too much turbulence.
Dry. Even better: dry after a couple of cold or damp days.
But having said all that, different pollinators evolved to tie down different ecological niches and there will always be someone up and about.
Bright and early this morning, around 7am, I spent a jolly five minutes watching a smattering of bees, wasps, and even a tit of some sort rummaging away in the dingly-dangly blossom of a sycamore and in the hawthorn and ivy entwined around the old tree.
Somewhere near you right now, a bee is navigating by colours you can’t see toward flowers you’ve never properly noticed.
Summer is happening whether we pay attention or not.
Go Deeper
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If you want to go deeper, I am in the process of putting together an 8-session therapeutic nature connection programme that will run in September and October in Southeast London.
Reply if you’d like to hear more.
‘It was like a mental reset.’ — Matt
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