Garden Variety

I often feel like there are certain animals that get a bit of favouritism amongst illustrators. Likely this has a lot to do with animals that are favourites amongst people generally… your cats, puffins, a highland coo if you're here in Scotland, dolphins; you know, the big hitters.

One of my favourite things to do is to draw the overlooked, or really common animals that are just as awesome, but don’t get the same amount of adoration because we see them all the time, and forget to bask in their wonder. And in this case, I had an enabler to get drawing, in the form of Fiona Luing, the phenomenal jewellery designer behind LuingSmith. Together, we have created a series of prints, stickers and the most amazing illustrated jewellery featuring a trio of oft-overlooked garden insects. The illustrations detail a Garden Snail, a Seven Spot Ladybird and a Common Carder Bee. We discussed the Seven Spot Ladybird in a previous post, so today we’re going to do a quick squint at the Common Carder Bee.

It’s a fluffy, orangey/gingery wee bee (about 1.3cm to be exact), and you can find it basically anywhere in the UK where there are flowers. They’re social bees (not like the solitary bees we talked about in this post), which means they nest in a little colony of anywhere up to 200 workers. Queens hibernate over winter, emerging in spring to lay eggs which hatch as workers and keep the nest ticking over and going like clockwork. Later in the year, male bees are born, and they mate with any new females who will be prospective queens. In the autumn (the common carder bee is active until as late as November if there are flowers to feed on) the workers, males and the old queen die, while those new prospective queens hunker down and hibernate, ready to kick off a new year with gusto.

In addition to being one of the less-common species of social bee here in the UK, the Common Carder has a really long tongue, so they can feed on flowers with tubey shapes, like the lavender pictured in the print created for the Garden Variety Collab.

Once I’d created the above illustration, to be made into a snazzy A5 print and a sticker, I scaled one of the wee bees right back to a much more simple, vector line drawing. The talented Fiona then took the illustration to be engraved into one of her amazing, chunky, recycled silver jewels, and you can see the results in the images below.

The prints and stickers are available on the Lab Shop now, the jewellery is much more limited but available through LuingSmith. Together, we’ll also have a wee showcase of these pieces (and more, so much more) at our Parallels exhibition, opening at the end of September for a very limited two weekends. You can find out more and sign up for news via Parallels.