I didn’t have any plans for today’s ‘wild’ activity, it was meant to rain and that hampered my thoughts of what I could do. I decided to play it safe and just spend some time in the garden. I know at some point I want to take part in the spittlebug survey so I went to have a look at the lavender to see if there was any about, strangely I didn’t find any but did come across a rosemary beetle.
There was a lot of buzzing coming from a neighbours garden so I popped round to see if I could find out where it was coming from. They have a plant on the fence that adjoins our garden which was covered in bees. There must have been approx. 30-40 bees on the bush at anyone time. Unfortunately we have no idea what plant it is but it would be great for any garden that wants to attract bees!
As far as I could tell there were four species of bee; Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) which seemed to be the majority, honey bees which I saw two of, Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) and then Tree bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum).
Once I was back in my own garden I noticed I had a harlequin ladybird larvae on me, I knew there was blackfly and greenfly on the runner beans so I thought that would be a good place to relocate him. I didn’t expect him to start eating them straight away. I have never seen them feeding before 🙂
On May 10th I wanted to get some images of the Starlings taking food into the roof space. They were visiting fairly frequently and also removing faecal sacs. Then their behaviour changed, at first I wondered if it was my presence but I had stood and watched them before with no effect. One of the adults was taking food to the nest entrance, calling and then flying to the top of the roof calling again, this pattern continued for the next 20mins I continued to watch. Once it was getting dark I left but apparently the calling continued, I believe they were trying to call their young out of the nest.
I have also now noticed that there’s a Blue Tit nest under one of the tiles of the porch. The parents perch on the telephone wire before darting in to feed the chicks 🙂 While watching the Blue Tits I heard a lot of bees. Looking up I noticed a slightly broken fascia board and realised the bees were going inside – Tree bumblebee’s. I did mention it to my friend, he doesn’t mind bees so is letting them stay as long as they don’t cause any trouble! 
