Buzzzzzzz!!!!!

There was definitely a buzz in the garden today. The usual Anthophora plumipes males were now joined by the first female of the year (above), feeding on the Pulmonaria. The Pulmonaria, unfortunately, was in the shade, so I couldn't take as sharp photos as I would have liked. A male Osmia bicornis (previously rufa) was patrolling the grape Hyacinths and a female Andrena fulva made a brief appearance. Just on cue, as the Cherry, a favourite of this bee, started to bloom yesterday.
 A Green Shieldbug was out sunbathing, also the first of the year. Many young wolf spiders were out too in the sun, stalked by my young cat, who likes to hunt and eat them, to my dismay. A Peacock butterfly passed by, but didn't settle.

Unidentified Andrena sp. on a dandelion.

Male Osmia bicornis

Male Anthophora plumipes.

Green shieldbug

Flea beetle, Altica sp.

Cherry pollinators fest!

It was a warm, sunny afternoon and the cherry was at full bloom (three weeks earlier than last year), attracting a menagerie of bees, butterflies, queen wasps and flies. I did saw a honeybee, but I think even without this species, the cherry would be fully pollinated given the number and diversity of insects on it.

 Several bees were firsts for the year, including Bombus lapidarius, B. pascuorum and Melecta albifrons. I saw the first male red mining bee yesterday but they seemed to be everywhere today.

Bombus lapidarius queen 

Anthophora plumipes female

Queen wasp grooming

Possibly a dronefly

Male Osmia bicornis

and a Peacock also settled repeatedly on the blossom to feed

A small shining metallic wasp fell on the small pond and was rescued.

The first water beetle in the Victorian bath that makes our mini pond, awaiting ID.

Melecta albifrons, a cuckoo bee that parasitises A. plumipes, feeding on Muscari

 Melecta albifrons,  resting on a daffodil

And finally, a shot of a Red Mason Bee patrolling the Muscari.

Flies and bees

The morning started chilly, but when the sun appeared in the middle of the day I peeked out of the conservatory and saw a male Anthophora plumipes, the first of the year, stopping on a stone by the rosemary to sunbathe. It patrolled the garden and briefly settled to feed on the lungwort. I watched another male in a front garden in my street later in the day.

Male A. plumipes feeding on Pulmonaria officinalis.

A bit of hovering...

...and a bit of basking.

  On a south-facing Clematis montana in bloom I found a couple of honeybees and a hoverfly, Syrphus ribesii (top shot).

And in my local wildlife garden, a queen Buff-tailed bumblebee searched for a nest site.

It is the start of the bee season and I shall take my macro camera with me from now on in my outings.

Spring at last!

The last couple of days have seen the temperatures finally rising over the freezing conditions we've had during March and early April. The lovely, milder, sunny weather we had today meant  I had many 'firsts' of the year. Until today this year, I had not seen a butterfly and I had only seen the occasional bees and bumblebees. Today Garden Ants, Lasius niger, were active in the garden, a clumsy female Dronefly enjoyed the sun and walked over the daffodil flowers feeding (above). Two male Anthophora plumipes patrolled around flowers, and even the first female of the year payed a short visit too. The males occasionally fed on wallflowers, hyacinths and wild primroses.
I saw my first butterfly of the year today, a Small Tortoiseshell, unfortunately, could get no photos, as my cat found her before me and chased her away.

This queen wasp, Vespula vulgaris, also first of the year, got in the conservatory.

A Tegenaria with its egg sac on a stilt. It is under the lid of the water butt, so I guess the photo is upside down

A male Anthophora plumipes rests for a few seconds on foxglove leaves.

My cat becomes quite the entomologist when flying insects start to appear. She often alerts me of insects in the garden, but also disturbs them when they try to feed, to my annoyance! Later in the year, she becomes disinterested, and I can relax and watch insects at my leisure.

The end of the affair

As the solitary bee herald of spring, Anthophora plumipes, is my favourite bee. It is with some sadness I found this dead male on the path today. The rain might have contributed to its demise, but it might also have reached the end of its natural life. In my patch, the first males appear at the beginning of March, and the last males, usually worn individuals, fly until the middle of May, barely two months of male activity, but the lives of individual males are bound to be even shorter, something I was referring to in my last post. On the bright side, the females will be still busy nesting for another month

On the odd life cycle of bumblebees

I stopped by the comfrey patch this morning. The comfrey has now been in blossom for a good month. A Small White butterfly was feeding on comfrey, but I couldn't snap her. A ginger queen Bombus pascuorum fed on the blossom. A queen wasp got comfortable on a leaf and basked in the sun, as did some hoverflies. While I watched a couple of Anthophora plumipes males patrolling and feeding, a tiny worker of the tree bumblebee Bombus hypnorum, the first of the year, turned up (above). As I compared the sizes of these two bees – the bumblebee worker was smaller than A. plumipes - I reflected on the different life cycles of these two bee species. A. plumipes, a solitary bee, has males and females, while bumblebees, in addition of males and females (queens), have a worker caste. In bumblebees there are no males for most of the year: A male has a relatively short - if hectic - life. Upon emergence in the summer, he will find a queen and mate with her. The queen will store his sperm and use it to fertilise her eggs the following spring, when she will emerge from overwintering, build a nest and lay fertilised eggs, which will hatch into worker larvae. She will be busy collecting nectar and pollen from early flowering trees and plants to rear these larvae, and once the workers emerge, they will take over from the queen in collecting more nectar and pollen for subsequent eggs, although they won't reproduce themselves.  In the summer, the last batch of eggs of the queen will produce new queens and males, which the workers will help rear. Once they leave the nest, the founder queen and workers will die and the cycle starts again. Wasps, ants, bees, and bumblebees (hymenopterans) share a weird way to determine the sex of the offspring: fertilised eggs become females and unfertilised eggs become males: a system called haplodiploidy.

  Most sexual organisms have two sets of chromosomes: a set they inherit from their mother and another that comes from their father, but as bumblebees and other hymenopterans do not have a dad they just have a single set of chromosomes, the set coming from their mother.

How strange is that? If you think about it, the system means that bumblebee males don’t have dads, they also cannot have sons, only daughters, although they can have grandsons and have granddads. In addition, this arrangement causes strange relationships between the family members. We are equally related to our parents than to our kids – on average – but due to haplodiploidy, bumblebee sisters are more strongly related than they are to their mums. This is because full sisters have received an identical set of chromosomes from their dad, in addition to the set they receive from their mum, which is a mixture from the sets the queen received from her parents.

 This unbalanced genetic relationship between mother-daughters and sisters is thought to underlay the evolution of the worker caste, which do not reproduce, but help their mother to rear their own sisters.

The solitary bee Anthophora plumipes

A wasp? No, the exquisite wasp mimic hoverfly Myothropa florea

This is the real wasp. A queen common wasp 

Hoverfly Syrphus ribesii 

Another basking fly

A queen Bombus pascuorum

Solitary bees are back!

In the last week I have been spotting more and more species of solitary bees around. First on scene, as usual, at the beginning of March, Anthophora plumipes, the Hairy Footed Flower bee. Then, a couple of days ago I saw the first Andrena fulva (Tawny mining bee) and yesterday I saw a couple of unidentified Andrena sp. (below). Today the garden was buzzing with at least 4 males A. plumipes, and a female feeding on Erysimum, and the cast was complete when in the afternoon a male Osmia rufa (Red Mining Bee) turned up and stopped to bask on the wooden frame of the conservatory (above). All of them have broken records as to how early they have appeared in the year compared to my previous records, which is not surprising given how mild this winter has been. From a few days to a few weeks before previous years, just as many flowers are also blooming early. The Red Mason Bees breed in our bee hotel, but we have been making another one from reclaimed floorboards and canes, I will push to finish it this weekend as females won't take long to appear.
 Are your bees early too?

Andrena sp.

Another Andrena enjoying a Dandelion

The new bee hotel in construction

Anthophora mating!

Since the early morning, a couple of beautifully fresh Anthophora plumipes males had been patrolling the garden, occasionally chasing each other or stopping to sunbathe a bit or feed on Erysimum, tete-a-tete daffodils or Hyacinths. After lunch, I noticed a female feeding on the Erysimums, the first of the year (just 5 days after the 1st male of the year). In a few seconds, a male spotted her and mating ensued immediately. It lasted long enough for me to grab the camera, dash outside and take a couple of shots (above and bottom shots). It is the first time I see a completed mating in this species.

Male grooming itself

The Bee and the Bee Nettle

I found a patch of White Dead-nettle, Lamium album, on my usual daily route. It is in a nicely kept garden and, although it could have left there on purpose, its days might be counted and it could be removed the next time the garden is weeded. If time allows, I stop for a few minutes each day to watch bees feeding on it. The White Dead-nettle is a member of the mint family and it is quite easy to recognise with its nettle-like leaves coupled with white whorls of flowers. Another name for this plant is bee nettle, which is quite apt, as it is an appreciated source of early nectar and pollen for long-tongued bees. One of the days I visited, I tool a photo of the flowers and when I reviewed it at home I found out I had inadvertently shot a male of Anthophora plumipes passing by in his patrol (above). Yesterday there were an A. plumipes female and a Bombus hortorum queen feeding at the same time. Both stayed for quite a while, fastidiously visiting every open flower.

A Bombus hortorum queen and a female A. plumipes (bottom right hand corner) feeding

Female A. plumipes and White Dead-nettle

For Bombus hortorum, a very long tongued bumblebee, the White Dead nettle is the predominant native source of nectar and pollen in April, although I have watched this bumblebee feeding on ornamental Hyacinths, Rosemary, Broom and Apple blossom in early spring.

Melecta, a cleptoparasitic bee

The plum tree started flowering last week and today it was buzzing with bees. I counted six species, Bombus terrestris and lapidarius queens, Anthophora plumipes males and females, Andrena fulva, with males actively patrolling the branches, and the first males Osmia rufa of the year. Later, a black bee with white and grey hair patches and dark wings turned up. It was Melecta albifrons, a cleptoparasite of A. plumipes. I haven't found much information on M. albifrons so the following life history account mainly comes from a study on the American species, Melecta separata. Melecta females parasitise Anthophora species that nest communally. They explore their host's nesting aggregations in search of finished nests. A female, upon finding a nest will start digging and breaking open the sealed entrance. Then she will lay an egg on the roof of the cell, seal the cell and replug the nest. Anthophora females usually attack the cuckoo bee, but she either flies away or if inside the nest it defends herself with her sting. The Melecta larva hatches a day earlier than the Anthophora's and is very mobile. They pierce and drain the Anthophora egg and any other Melecta eggs that she finds in the cell with their long sickle-shaped mandibles. Only one Melecta larvae survives, as if two are born at the same time one will kill the other. The larvae then feeds on the syrupy mixture of pollen and nectar intended for the Anthophora larvae. Subsequent larval stages lack the long mandibles of the first stage. The following year a Melecta will emerge from the cell, having consumed the food intended for Anthophora grubs. In a M. separata nesting aggregation 20% of the nests were parasitized.
The Melecta albifrons visiting my plum showed a very different behaviour from other bees, sluggish, like she didn't want to fly too much, climbing over the flowers to reach each of them and feeding showing a very long tongue. The bee stayed for quite a while feeding on the plum flowers. M. albifrons has a very similar distribution to its host in Britain (click here for distribution map), reaching up to the Yorkshire Wolds in the north. Its peak flight period is a few weeks after the emergence of the host, and flies from April to early June. Given that it doesn't need to collect pollen for provisioning its brood, the bee is not fussy about what flowers to visit, and tends to fly at short daily periods - the warmest - as they are less endothermic than their Anthophora hosts, as shown in the figure below.

References
Thorp, R. (1969). Ecology and Behavior of Melecta separata callura (Hymenoptera: Anthophoridae). American Midland Naturalist, 82 (2) DOI: 10.2307/2423782
P. G. Willmer and G. N. Stone (2004). Behavioral, Ecological, and Physiological Determinants of the Activity Patterns of Bees. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 34 , 347-466 : doi:10.1016/S0065-3454(04)34009-X

Spring gallery

It has been quite warm today, 18.5 oC! A great day to start spring, the garden was buzzing and there was a lot of "firsts" of the year. One of those days it is hard to choose what to blog about. I saw my first butterflies of the year, a Red Admiral Peacock (in flight), a Small Tortoiseshell feeding on willow and a male Brimstone; first queen wasp; first pair of 7 spots mating and my first photo of a ladybird taking off. Also, first Bombus hypnorum, B. hortorum and first female Anthophora plumipes. The following shots are the best of the day.

A fortunate consequence of 7 spot ladybird communal hibernation is that you don't have to look far for a partner when you wake up!

A groggy queen wasp landed on yellow plastic 

And a hyperparasitoid flightless wasp, possibly Gelis sp. which looks rather like an ant walks on the blue bin

Philodromus spider sunbathing 

The first female Anthophora plumipes leaves a daffodil, which has marked her back with yellow pollen 

A male A. plumipes briefly resting on a buddleia trunk. Males look velvety this early in the year. They have been patrolling the garden since the 11th of March

 A Pholcus spider on the outside toilet looks much fatter than yesterday, after enjoying her spiderly meal.

A Harlequin and a 7 spot look like they are playing peek-a-boo

B. hortorum visiting Hyacinths