30 Days Wild 2019 – Day 04

After a long day at work it was nice to get out into the garden.  When I get to my patch I like to go out into the garden and check on all the plants to make sure they are all okay.  Today I discovered the cat had dug up my borage and used the pot as a toilet! I was not best pleased; there is field behind the fence why can’t he just use that! 

As I was walking around I noticed there were a lot of bees on the few remaining flowers of the aquilegia.  I started to follow one of the bees around the flowers as he flew from one to the next.  I think he is an Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) and believe he is male due to his facial hair :).  Early bumblebee’s have a reddish tail and yellow markings but their colours can vary and in workers their yellow abdominal strip can be reduced.  Why does there have to be so much variation in colour form bee to bee of the same species?! It makes it very difficult for people like me that are new bees! A lot of studying needs to be done to make me more confident in my identifications.   

Early bumblebees are one of the first to emerge and are active from March to June.  They have short tongues and I think that my photograph shows him nectar robbing.  This is when a bee chews a hole in the flower close to the nectar and steals it without touching the reproductive part of the flower, thus not helping pollination.  There were however other bees on the flowers that were taking nectar, providing the pollination that the early bumblebee was not.