Nature

The pollinators are coming…

Outside in the garden on sunny days, early-foraging bumbles and honeybees are tempted out by the lure of fragrant, nectar-rich winterflowering shrubs such as wintersweet and winterbox, and protein-rich flowering bulbs like snowdrops and aconites. This co-dependency of plants and animals has evolved countless times the world over, and this month at the Botanic Garden, we are focusing on some of the most intriguing plant + pollinator stories at our Orchid Festival, which opens on 7 February 2015.

Orchids are considered amongst the most exotic and alluring of flowers, but their scent and beauty have not evolved to ensure they end up impulse purchases in the supermarket trolley! Petal shape, nectar reward, triggers, traps, scent and glowing colours are just a few of the tricks that orchids employ to attract a vast array of animal pollinators. This cast includes iridescent bees, wasps, moths with super-long tongues, flies and jewel-coloured hummingbirds, all of which will be paying the Garden’s Orchid Festival a visit - in giant, cut-out form!

Orchids are found the world over, their diversity the result of co-evolved relationships between plant and pollinator. For example, in South America, huge, shiny male euglossine bees harvest scents from rainforest orchids, store them in large armoured pouches on their hind legs, and then release them to attract female bees. In collecting the scents, the bees dislodge special pollen packets, which are then carried to the next orchid, effecting pollination. This is just one of six amazing pollinator stories featured.

We’ll be creating a magnificent display of popular orchid species and hybrids including suspended globes of Oncidium and pedestals of slipper orchids, Paphiopedilum, floating over open water. Throughout the tropical rainforest displays the focus will be on wild orchid species, grouped to show particular floral adaptations from insect mimicry to the stink of rotting flesh, and we’ll be using some new and fun ways to present the ingenious biology of orchids – watch out for the huge Judge Dredd style hummingbirds and giant thynnid wasps…!

The Orchid Festival at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden runs until Sunday 22 March 2015. A full programme of accompanying Orchid Festival events, opening times and admission charges is available on the website at www.botanic.cam.ac.uk. you would do to solve different health issues. Would you work it out yourself, see a pharmacist, call NHS 111 or see your GP? We all solve things in different ways. Knowing what you do can help our local GP Practices and the people who make decisions about local health services plan better care. Please do take part in our survey either on our website or by contacting our office.

We also need you to help us develop our local ‘Care Home’ project. We want to use our statutory “Duty to Enter & View” local care homes. This means we have a legal right to visit places that provide public health or care services, to see what kind of care they are providing.

We need to recruit volunteers to be ‘Authorised Representatives’. Your role will be to go into local care homes and talk to the people there about the care being provided. This might include talking to residents, their relatives, friends and care home staff. You will get lots of training and support. Do you have any recent experience of a local care home, or do you know someone who has? Please tell us about it. We will use what you tell us to plan which homes we will visit and what to look at. We are also talking to the County Council and the Care Quality Commission, to help us plan where we should visit.

Get in touch to find out more or we can come and talk to your group about Healthwatch.

Call us on 01480 420628 or visit www.healthwatchcambridgeshire.co.uk

Care Network

Local mums make the most of the CAB kiosk at Melbourn Hub.

The Advicehub kiosk at Melbourn Hub continues to provide on-line advice to the Melbourn community.

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Photograph @Cambridge CAB (courtesy of Phillip Mynott Photography)

The kiosk is provided by Cambridge CAB, who offer free, independent, confidential and impartial advice. The kiosk offers answers to common problems on issues including money, benefits, relationships, employment and housing.

It also has links to local advice and signposting services such as Care Network’s Community Navigators, who can help older and vulnerable people with information on matters such as services you need or activities you’d like to join in with.

The best way to find out more about the kiosk is to go and have a try. It’s straightforward to use, guides you through common issues and questions and takes you to safe, accurate information and advice.

If you can’t find an answer to your question on the kiosk, a trained CAB adviser from N Herts CAB is available at the Hub on the first Monday and third Tuesday of the month, from 9.30am – 12.30.

If you want to contact the Community Navigator project with a question, or if you are interested in volunteering as a Community Navigator, please contact Enid Instone-Brewer on 01954 212100 or email Enid.I-B@care-network.org.uk

For more information contact Lynne McAulay, Care Network Community Development Manager on 01954 211919, email lynne.m@care-network. org.uk or visit www.advicehub.org

A fresh look at your relationships in 2015

There is no better time than the start of a new year to take stock and look for opportunities to make life-enhancing changes.

For example, why not consider a spring clean for your relationships in 2015? Sometimes we simply need help with how to make a fresh start and where to begin? The first step is to get a plan together. This may mean clearing out old bad habits and replacing them with new ones that are healthier. It is good to set some small goals to help us manage our relationships and our own emotional health and wellbeing better. Do not think too big, however. It is no good setting ourselves up for failure, we need to be realistic about what we can achieve, otherwise things can seem too daunting.

Difficult relationships with our partners and family members, along with the expectation that others will make us happy, can cause us to feel dissatisfied with our lives as a whole and can have quite a damaging effect. It is important take time out to assess the health of our relationships and family life. We need to ask ourselves - what is it that makes us feel content as individuals? If we can avoid becoming dependent on others to provide that warm, contented glow that makes life worth living – but look to ourselves to access it – we are heading in the right direction.

Along with assessing our relationships, it helps to have awareness of our work/ life balance and where we might need to make adjustments. It is very easy for our working lives to take over and for the boundaries between our work and home lives to become blurred, particularly when working from home. We do not necessarily have to have huge chunks of time for those we care for to feel special, but it is important to make the most of the time that we do have, by creating quality time. It is the small, day-to-day interactions between couples and family members that make a huge difference.

Let 2015 be the year where you invest – not only in your physical health - but in your total wellbeing, which includes focusing on your emotional and mental health and putting yourself first. It is the best thing you can do, not only for you, but also for those around you, who will benefit enormously when you are happier, healthier and a pleasure to be with.

Should you feel you need some support to work on any of the above issues or would simply like to chat things through with a counsellor at our outpost in Melbourn – please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at Relate Cambridge. Relationship support is available in Melbourn from Relate Cambridge The sessions are held in the small meeting room at Melbourn hub on Wednesday each week. Appointment times are: 10:30; 11:45; 13:00. For more information or to book an appointment, telephone 01223 357424 MonThur 8am-10pm, Fri 8 am-6pm, Sat 9am-5pm (confidential answerphone at all other times). www.relatecambridge.org.uk

Melbourn Bloomsday Celebration

A Melbourn Celebration of an Event which Never Happened yet Continued All Day on 16th June 1904.

Everyone will have heard of James Joyce, the celebrated writer, one of the giants of Modern European and World Literature, who died in 1941.

Possibly his most famous creation is ‘Ulysses’, with its Everyman hero Leopold Bloom, who lives, loves and carries out his day-to-day activities in Dublin, on 16th June 1904. The novel also commemorates the day on which Joyce met and fell in love with his life partner Nora Barnacle.

Our Melbourn Bloomsday Celebration is a selection from the incidents and events which happen to Leopold Bloom, which we create in Melbourn on 16 June through public readings and re-enactments from the text of Ulysses.

Each event has been placed in a real life Melbourn setting, echoing the setting described by Joyce, and should prove to be playful, life affirming and community enriching.

We invite all interested individuals and groups to participate in this Inaugural Bloomsday Celebration. For more details contact Hugh Pollock, Co-ordinator Melbourn Bloomsday Celebration Group (01763 260253) hugh.m.pollock@gmail. com

Melbourn Bloomsday Celebration Group are a Not for Profit Group. All proceeds go to the long-established English charity WaterAid (Reg Charity No 288701). Which provides access to clean water in desperately poor communities which do not have clean water.