The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3292 by Angharad Copyright© 2021 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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The next day, Diane and I set about drawing up a job description for our abuse investigator. We decided that we'd look for someone with a counselling or psychotherapy background in the hope that they'd cause minimal distress in ascertaining details. I also thought they may be able to suss out anyone who was making spurious or malicious complaints.

At lunch we shared our efforts with Debbie and Tom, I was only looking to fund someone part time but Daddy said he thought he'd be able to find the money to make it a full time post and they could rewrite our protocols and advice for students and also provide some counselling for students who were having other issues, like homesickness especially amongst the first year girls.

Daddy suggested we should have a panel to review cases and involve student health in that. Our investigator wouldn't sit on the panel because they'd be providing evidence as would our student health nurses, their representative would be their manager or her assistant. Someone from each faculty would sit on the panel and it would be chaired by a senior academic or administrator. They would have the power to involve the police if something criminal was alleged and thus charges could be brought against the alleged perpetrator, obviously, any involvement of a police investigation took precedence over the university one and if convicted in a criminal court, the university would expel the convicted person. The university also reserved the right to expel or sack anyone, student or staff who was found to have abused anyone else working or studying at the university.

Diane, who'd come with us to lunch agreed to type up all these ideas over the next day or so and we'd circulate them for agreement/amendment. Once they were agreed they'd be circulated to the university council and once approved by them, would become part of the protocols and regulations of the university and would be available for anyone associated with the university to download them from our website.

I realised that my main role would be getting it passed by the university council, who were mainly comprised of older men who would try to suggest it was either just a bit of adolescent boisterousness or weird courtship rituals. If they did, I'd try to persuade them there was a need and after that I'd go straight for the jugular, assuming they had any red stuff going up to the brain that didn't originate in vineyards in Burgundy. There were one or two who I suspected had blood in their alcohol.

Once we had things up and running, I saw my involvement as minimal except possibly discharging the outcome of the panel, in other words, I would fire the bullets they made and sack any member of staff they found guilty and expel any student also convicted by them. We had to agree a form of appeal, but I didn't think many would appeal, but who knows. It's my signature that goes on the letters of expulsion from this faculty as its head, so I do have ultimate responsibility, not something I enjoy but then I enjoy abuse even less.

June had begun rather nicely with warm sunny weather and it disappeared as quickly as it appeared and we were back to traditional summer weather of rain and wind with occasional rumbles of thunder and some mornings beset with mists which took a while to burn off.

At home, Danielle, Trish and Livvie sat and watched as much of the European Championship as they could, this the Euro's soccer competition and although I wasn't really interested I was unofficially supporting all the British teams, especially Scotland and Wales, who are always underdogs. Danielle was really taken with the 'genius' of Gareth Bale who apparently made both goals that Wales scored against Turkey although he also missed by a mile a penalty that he should have put away with little difficulty.

Danielle came with me on a dormouse survey which I'd been asked to run at the last minute as the usual organiser came down with some bug or other and had to self isolate. As the only dormouse license holder amongst the surveyors, I had to make sure everyone was up to speed on their survey skills, including handling any dormice we found. I was also the only one with a balance to weigh them and with proper plastic bags to check any nest boxes we suspected may have occupants.

For those who've never been dormouse surveying, the principles are simple. The nest box is like a back to front bird box with the hole at the back. When you check them, you put a bung or plug of cloth into the hole then slide the lid open to see if there's anyone at home. Sometimes you can see them, but usually it's just nesting materials you see. Dormice weave their nests whereas wood mice simply collect dead leaves from the woodland floor and use that. Bank voles use grass cuttings, though we don't very often see those, and birds use all sorts of materials from feathers to mud or moss and tree bumblebees just fill the box with the cells they use to protect their young. According to the experts, tree bumblebees Bombus hypnorum have only been recorded in the UK since 2001 but by 2013 had reached Scotland, so far it has no parasitic species associated with it unlike most of the regular species who pretty well all have some form of cuckoo bumblebee associated with them.

The name cuckoo bumblebee is quite apt because these parasites look to take over an existing nest, usually killing the queen and laying their eggs for the original workers to raise for them. The cuckoo species do not have workers as such relying on the original species to provide those, so you never see cuckoo species collecting pollen as this is collected to feed the bee larvae, so they don't have corbiculae or pollen baskets on their hind legs and they also have thicker, almost armour plated skins because if their plan goes wrong, the workers of the nest suspecting an intruder will attempt to sting it to death.

Bumblebees are usually docile unless you mess with their nest and unlike honey or hive bees, don't have a barb on the sting, so they can sting numerous times, however, they rarely sting anyone and will permit degrees of provocation that honeybees, which are quite short tempered would not. I remember on a course I did on bumblebees that we had to catch and identify several bees to try and differentiate between them. We were advised to keep them captive for no more than five minutes and yes they get a bit upset, trying to work out why they are in a jar or bottle or for experts a special tube thing they can use for marking the bees with a lattice across the top through which you can apply some form of marker that is harmless to the insect. One researcher I read of used correction fluid with coloured dots to identify different individuals.

Most bumblebees nest in abandoned mouse holes in the ground and some even have the capacity to smell the odour of mouse urine to find the holes, which could probably provide the basis of a very difficult question for pub quizzes or Trivial Pursuit.

Other things which turn up in dormouse boxes are hornets and bats. In the former, you are advised to replace the lid and run like hell, in the case of the latter, you are instructed to make sure you don't disturb said bat and ensure you don't catch its feet with the lid when you replace it. All species of bat are protected in the UK and I think in the EU as well, so it is incumbent upon anyone finding one not to disturb or harm it without a licence. Like dormice, bats are generally declining in the UK which has one of the worst records of biodiversity loss in the civilised world, most of which is caused by intensive farming and overuse of pesticides and other habitat destroying agents. One of the worst of these is the neurotoxin neonicotinoid pesticides, which are harmful to many of the pollinator insects including bumblebees, so were banned in the EU and England and Wales. In Scotland one of these awful chemicals has been allowed to be used to kill fish lice in salmon farming.

It's known these chemicals kill invertebrates in fresh and sea water, so goodness knows how much damage they will do in the seas around Scotland. The fault is the overcrowding of salmon in the pens allowing lice to thrive which is all back down to squeezing every penny you can out of any enterprise and to hell with the consequences as long as you maximise your profits. Clearly, things have got to change or climate change will not be only catastrophe to visit us.

Tom and the girls have been trying to plant bee friendly flowers in the garden and the grass in the orchard is now sporting many more wild flowers than it used to and this is simply because we don't mow it as often as we used to, which enables the wildflowers to emerge. One form of this is called, 'no mow May' which arose as an experiment in one area in the States and was quickly adopted by other groups when they saw how positive the results were. Basically, people are asked not to cut their lawns for the whole of May and to notice the wild flowers which will grow and the bees and other insects that appear in greater numbers to drink the nectar and eat the pollen - though bees don't eat pollen except as larvae.

As we drove back from the dormouse survey, Danielle was full of it and once again said she really fancied studying biology because she enjoyed her involvement with nature. Sister Maria had asked her to write something about a dormouse survey in the school magazine, so I was asked to check it for her.

"Well, at least you have some fresh material to write about, especially when that wood mouse ran up your arm. I did tell you to pull your sleeve up beforehand."

"Ha ha," she chuckled, "yeah, but it was you it bit when you grabbed it."

"Yes it was," I agree checking the small wound on my thumb and was rather pleased it wasn't a yellow-necked mouse as they're bigger and bite harder. I'd only grabbed the mouse because she was squealing, Danielle, that is, afraid it would get caught in her hair or bite her on the face. Usually, they jump off before they get very far but this one didn't and I leant over and grabbed it and got nipped. Oh well, I shall wear my battle scars with pride, injured in the course of my duty. I smirked to myself, well we have to get our laughs where we can, don't we and with life as it is at present, we don't have much to laugh about, especially as lockdown has been extended for another month as this new delta variant virus spreads more rapidly than the previous mutation. I've had one vaccination and hope to get a second before too long. The second one is supposed to give much greater protection against the risk of serious illness arising from Covid and thus reduces the risk of long-Covid, from which so many people are suffering months or even a year or so later. It's a horrible disease.