Bumblebee nest

 Buff-tailed bumblebees Bombus terrestris are nesting under a moss-covered pile of rocks in the garden. There were field mice living in the rock pile last summer and apparently it's quite common for these bumblebees to nest in their tunnels after the rodents have abandoned them.

The workers are very active and there's a lot of busy pollen collecting going on at the moment, with bees returning with full pollen baskets very few minutes yesterday afternoon.

The pollen they are carrying is orange and most of it is probably coming from this plant, Geum 'Totally Tangerine', which is in full bloom. It's an excellent bumblebee plant for species with short tongues, with open, easily accessible flowers and a long flowering period. The bees collect the pollen by working their way around the central tuft of stamens, buzzing to shake the pollen free and into their fur, they combing it into their pollen baskets.

Green dock leaf beetles

 There are lots of broad-leaved dock Rumex obtusifolius plants around at the moment with foliage that looks like this, resembling green lace.

It's the handiwork of the larvae of the green dock leaf beetle Gastrophysa viridula - turn over a leaf where damage is just beginning and you'll find several on the underside, eating the soft tissue between the leaf veins. When fully fed they burrow down into the soil and pupate, emerging as adult beetles within a couple of weeks.

And here are the rather beautiful adult leaf beetles, mating. The abdomen of the female is so distended with eggs that it displaces her wing cases. She'll lay as many as 1000 eggs and, with a short generation time, the numbers of these insects can rise rapidly as summer progresses.

Flying chimney sweepers

 There were scores of these little chimney sweeper Odezia atrata moths flying in the sunlight in the hay meadow in Durham University Botanic Garden this morning. It seemed as though there had been a recent mass emergence, since they were all in mint condition, with the white tips to their sooty-black wings intact.

Their larvae feed on the flowers of pignut, the white umbellifer growing amongst the hay rattle in the photo below.

The meadow has a sheltered, southerly-facing aspect, perfect for this little day-flying moth that only produces one generation, in early summer, each year.