Sickly smell

Somewhere on my rounds yesterday, I came around a corner to be greeted by a very sickly smell: an ivy in full flower, in full sun. Lots of bees - or bee-like - insects all over it, although they seem to have got lost from the snap which follows. The unopened flowers looked a bit sticky, perhaps the source of the smell.

Light zoom of general view

Light zoom of a close-up

A better effort, from reference 1

Better still

But while one can work out the flowers in real life, and just about work them out from the second and third snaps, it takes a diagram from reference 2 to do the job properly. A diagram which works well with the snaps, helps one to make some sense of them.

Guessing, the term sickly smell comes from the smell of sick rooms from the days before we had much in the way of either washing or ventilation.

Reference 1: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/lasi/resources/education/ivyvisitors.

Reference 2: https://beginnersbotany.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/ivy-hedera-helix-a-stellar-surprise/. Turned up by Google rather than by Bing.