March 2015 updates

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Beverages of the Adelaide Trip

As readers of the various posts about our trip to Adelaide will have realised we did a fair bit of shopping for bottled goods along the way.  This is a report on the quality of those purchase decisions (and to some extent on the purchase process - I refuse to use the term "experience"). Beer It came as a surprise to realise that all my beer stops were in the Clare Valley.  Possibly I was running out of room in the car by the time we got to Adelaide? Knappstein, Reserve Lager : this is produced close to the Knappstein Winery, well known as a source of good product.  As far as I could determine they only make this one style of beer, so the purchase was rather 'retail' with no tasting involved.  I am normally resistant to lager as it tends to be McBeer but this was definitely not that.  Very refreshing with a fruitiness in tatste and quite moreish: which could be dangerous at 5.6% ABV.  Will be looked into as an on-line purchase in the future.   Cla...
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The frost report

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Please note the lower case in the title: that should give you a hint this is nothing to do with Sir David of that ilk.  So should the fact that this is on a blog post, not a ouija board. Since there are a few folk who don't appear to like graphs  about the weather (or anything else) I have decided to put them at the bottom of the post and some burble about them at the top.  That might induce a bit discipline in my writing since I'll have to explain things in words rather then letting the pictures do the business. My starting point was to think about Ground frosts (temp below 2 o C) and air frosts (temp below 0 o C).  As I said in the May Weather report there are more days per month in which there are ground frosts than air frosts.  It was interesting that when I graphed the two series of average frost days per month (see Chart 1 below)  the two series were of a very similar shape and both fitted very well to a 4th order polynomial.  It will be int...
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Insects from pine trees

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This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
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