The Tawny Mining Bee

We've enjoyed a few really warm days this week. Bumblebee queens have come out of their winter refuges and are bumbling about looking for nesting sites and feeding on early flowers. Spring bees have also started to emerge, and one of the most striking, the Tawny Mining Bee, Andrena fulva, has also done so. I came across this fresh female flying about and finally settling on the leaf litter to bask. Females are covered on dense and bright orangey-red hairs, contrasting with their black heads and legs. The one below was sunbathing on the bird table in April last year after collecting some cherry pollen. As other Andrena species, females carry pollen in hair brushes on their back legs.

Males are so very different, slimmer, with a large white moustache and more obvious jaws:

This bee flies in a single generation, from late March to late May. The peak flight season on the Tawny Mining bee, April, coincides with flowering times of fruit trees and they can often be seen feeding on them, and contribute to their pollination. They use a diversity of other flowers, including blackthorn, broom and willow.
 The Tawny Mining bee nests in bare patches of ground on grassy areas and therefore is known to nest in gardens and parks. Nesting aggregations, in which many bees nest in the same area, can be quite large and the ground is the peppered with miniature volcanoes of loose soil around the nest entrance which they have dug out while they dig the nest. Despite them nesting near each other, the mining bees are solitary and each female digs her own nest and collects nectar and pollen for her own young. I will keep an eye for their nests, the next few weeks, and see if I can catch them as they come and go from their little volcanoes.