Mining bee ID?

This little bee was clinging to the washing when we brought it in from the washing line yesterday evening.

At first I thought it was the tawny mining bee Andrena fulva, but it seems that has black hairs in its face, not the white ones that this has. 

James McMillan @orchid_b kindly identified it for me as a red mason bee Osmia rufa.

Garden visitors

Some recent garden insect visitors during the last week. Thanks to Africa Gomez, author of the always fascinating BugBlog for IDing some of these for me.

I think this hoverfly, that had a conspicuously loud buzz and frequently returned to the same sunny spot when disturbed, is a narcissus fly Merodon equestris. Probably its larvae are even now feeding on our daffodil bulbs.

I think this is a small cuckoo bee (Nomada sp.?) visiting a Welsh poppy

An azure damselfly that hatched from our garden pond - didn't know until then that they were breeding there

A large hoverfly, identified for me by Africa Gomez as Myathropa florea

A sawfly Arge ustulata, whose larvae feed on the leaves of various hedgerow trees and shrubs

Two froghopper larvae that were inadvertently separated from their frothy 'cuckoo spit' when I was weeding the garden. They quickly blew some more bubbles.

An exquisitely metallic hoverfly soldier fly with interference colours in its eyes (thanks to Africa Gomez for the ID)

The solitary bee Osmia rufa collecting pollen and nectar from the poached egg plant Limnanthes douglasii. You can see here how they collect pollen on the underside of their abdomen. Thanks to Africa Gomez for the correct ID.

Bee antics

After a slow start the bee population is building up nicely in our garden. There's always a bit of a lag phase between the first queens coming out of hibernation to forage and begin nesting and the appearance of the first workers.

Columbines Aquilegia spp. are a good source of pollen for bumblebees but they need to learn a special technique for harvesting it, by clasping the stamens with their jaws and then using their front pair of legs to rake pollen down onto their bodies. Occasionally, if it's a big bee swinging from old stamens they break free from the flower and it suddenly drops away.

This bee has full pollen baskets and is going after the nectar, which is located high up in those nectar spurs at the top of the flower, so it has to force itself right up into the flower - which must impose a lot of wear-and-tear on wings when it backs out again. 

No wonder that smarter bumblebees soon learn to bite through the nectar spurs and steal the nectar without the need for these contortions - click here to see a columbine that has been robbed in this way.

The signs are that we are in for a good broad bean crop his year, since flowering has coincided with plentiful pollinators. The flowers need to be 'tripped', forcing down the lower lip and transferring pollen to the stigma, and this common carder bee is probably not strong or heavy enough to do this efficiently. The bigger, stronger bumblebees are better, but they soon lean to steal nectar by biting through the corolla tube, as you can see by clicking here.

Many years ago I carried out a lot of research in broad ban breeding and grew large trial plots. The scent of their flowers early in the morning is exquisite and very strong; there is an ancient legend that you would hallucinate if you fell asleep in flowering broad bean crop; click here for more on the folklore of this plant. 

The biggest 'bee magnet' early in the year has been alkanet Pentaglottis sempervirens, which I couldn't stop growing even if I wanted too, as it's somewhat invasive and, like dandelions, re-sprouts from small pieces of root left in the soil. It has recently been visited by this bee, which I think is the red mason bee Osmia rufa - a rare visitor to our garden, although I have seen its nest tunnels in mortar in the walls of a house not far away.

You can see the distinctive 'horns' on the face here and the large jaws  - used for collecting mud to plug their nest chambers.

I think I'll install some nest tubes like these to see if it can be coaxed to breed in the garden.

Red mason bee

Last week I visited a wonderful wildlife garden near Bristol where the owners had been extremely successful in developing colonies of red mason bees Osmia rufa, by providing tubes for them to nest in on the south-facing window ledges of their house.

Each one of these individual tubes contains several nest cells, each with an egg provisioned with pollen and sealed with mud.

The other key element in the garden was plenty of early-flowering pollen sources for the bees - hellebores, pulmonarias and the like. The activity in this colony had to be seen to be believed - scores of bees coming and going all day long. The benefit for the garden owners was that these insects are very efficient pollinators of their soft fruit bushes and fruit trees in spring.

The excellent Bees,Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS) provides a very useful downloadable information sheet on these delightful insects.