Critically Endangered
Around the World in 80 Days - Day 48
Today's post will look a little different. I just got home, it is now 11:30 pm. Going where we went in Washington is a 4 hour drive one way. I forgot to bring even a clipboard with me to use as an easel. Painting was not terribly easy without something flat or sturdy to set the paper on. The view was nice though, and I got to listen to drumming. I tried to take a bit of video and would share it so you could hear what my son does, but I swear that every single time I tried to take video they would stop and talk, then I'd stop the video and they'd get going again until I hit record. It was getting a little ridiculous so I gave up. This painting is honestly a complete guess. I looked at pictures of 12 or more Andrena species, and then just sort of made my own version based on those. I had to do that because I could not find any written description, no photos, and not even a scientific drawing of them. There were 3 found in 1963 from one spot in Crimea. None have been found since in spite of multiple surveys hoping to see them. That is the full extent of information I could find about them. It appears that other Andrena are quite small, I do not know if these are. I would love to find out how big these are, or really anything about them. I know their genus either as a whole is considered mining bees, but I'm not sure, it could be that most or all mining bees are part of the genus. I feel like this could be a math problem from school - if all mining bees are Andrena but not all Andrena are mining bees, what is the Andrena labiatula? This poor species does not even have a common name, and there are 2 other species whose names are almost exactly the same (and which Google tried to get me to search for instead).
I didn't have my light or large sheet of paper to put the painting on, so this is the picture you get. Next Saturday will probably be similar, though there may be a different backdrop. It was too cold for me to be outside because I need warm weather to do something like this without gloves. Maybe next week I can paint outside instead of in my car. I didn't have to keep the car running, it was mostly that the wind made things too cold, so having the car closed up was enough to keep me warm so long as I kept my son's sweatshirt on. Obviously I need to change the wipers or do some serious cleaning of the wipers because they've gotten streaky. It was kind of interesting, it didn't really rain at all in Washington, but the whole time we were in Oregon pretty much there was at least sprinkling if not an absolute downpour. Sorry about the rambling, I'm tired and need some sleep.