Tawny mining bee

 I encountered this lovely little female tawny mining bee Andrena fulva, provisioning her newly-excavated nest tunnel with pollen, on the Teesdale Way footpath between Egglestone and Meeting of the Waters. The lower three images are of what I think is a male of the same species, photographed in my own garden in County Durham, where tawny mining bees are excellent pollinators of blackcurrants.

Solitary bee, just hanging around

Every afternoon for the last three days this little solitary bee has been hanging from the same grass floret in our garden, gripping with its jaws. Occasionally it flies over to a lamb's ear Stachys byzantina plant to feed on the flowers, then it returns to exactly the same spot.

Update
I now know it's a fork-tailed flower bee Anthophora furcata

Thanks to the following on twitter, who all agreed on the ID
Africa Gomez @aBugBlog
Bumblebee etc. @wurflenii
Barry @scyrene

The wonderfully helpful naturalist community on Twitter are superb when you need ID help. They came up with the answer within 15 minutes of posting.

One of the interesting things about this species is that it nests in rotten tree stumps and we have several of those in the garden, with some few sawdust where something has been tunnelling into them. I'm hoping it it might be fork-tailed flower bees

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. 

Teesdale in early June.........

In early June the meadows in the middle part of the dale, around Middleton-in-Teesdale, are full of buttercups, while...

... the hawthorn blossom beside the riverbank footpaths is just past its peak.

In the middle of the river this fledgling dipper has been parked on a stone by its parents that are away collecting food, though it looks like it could feed itself.

This young rabbit was using a coltsfoot leaf for cover but ....

... it would have done better to run for the dense stand of butterbur leaves that could hide a hundred rabbits.

Upstream of Middleton-in-Teesdale, on the way to Bowlees, there are globe flowers blooming on the riverbank, alongside the white umbels of pignut.

You can hear a spotted flycatcher's beak snap shut when it catches a fly ..... and there are plenty of those around, including .....

... dungflies that are plentiful wherever there is livestock grazing in the fields and ....

..... empid flies that use nectaries of wood crane'sbill flowers are fuel stations.

The wet weather hasn't been kind to bees and this little solitary bees resting on an oak leaf looked bedraggled. Can anyone help with an ID? 

Hay rattle is coming into bloom in the hay meadows .....

..... and mountain pansy Viola lutea is flowering well. The epithet lutea means yellow but pure yellow pansies are in the minority - most have variable amounts of purple in their petals and this has a hint of it in the petal tips.

One-Sided Relationship

Dandelions are a terrific source of nectar and pollen for bumblebees ...

.... and for small solitary bees like those above. Can anyone help me identify any of these?

It might seem that this is a perfect example of a partnership between plant and pollinator, with generous rewards for services rendered by the insects, but this is a very one-sided relationship. Unlike typical flowers, most dandelions don’t actually need any pollen to set seeds.

Seeds are usually produced when male pollen fertilises a female egg cell inside the flower to produce an embryo inside of the developing seed, but in many dandelion species seeds are produced without the need for fertilisation, so the seedlings are genetic clones of the mother plant. All that pollen and nectar that sustains the bees, as well as the elaborate mechanism for presenting pollen to bees to maximise the chances of cross pollination, is redundant as far as the dandelion is concerned - a needless expense.

This production of seeds without pollination is called apomixis and in recent years it has attracted the interest of genetic engineers, because if it could be enginerred into GM crops they wouldn't require pollen for seed production. This would remove one major objection to these high-tech crops – that they can transfer their genes via pollen to organic crops or wild plant relatives. Without pollen, an apomictic crop could not contaminate non-GM crops, with the added bonus that it could reliably produce seeds without depending on insect pollinators.