Unusually, out of the two hundred or so photos I took today, the first turned out to be my favourite. It’s not that I haven’t posted bees on grape hyacinths before, or Common Mourning Bees, or even Common Bees on grape hyacinths, but I don’t think I’ve ever managed to fill the frame quite as well as this with the blue haze of a pot of muscari, and the bee posing in the centre adds a nice focal point.
A day of pottering around in the garden added four species to my 2026 bee list: a couple of Ashy Miners (Andrena cineraria), a male Orange-tailed Miner (Andrena haemorrhoa), a Short-fringed Mining Bee (Andrena dorsata) and two Common Carders (Bombus pascuorum) brought the bee tally so far to nineteen species, a number I wouldn’t usually expect to achieve until some time in April. I also saw the first Dotted Bee-fly of the year (Bombylius discolor), and might have posted him if I’d achieved a better portrait.
On the down side, my hoverfly list for the season has stalled on three species – Eristalis tenax, Eristalis pertinax and Meliscaeva auricollis. These three are generally among the earliest to fly, but there was a time when I’d expect to have recorded at least another half dozen species by now, and this spring I’m sad to say that quite diligent searching hasn’t yet turned up any of these. Last year was a notably poor season for hoverflies in my garden, and the current evidence seems to suggest that 2026 will be at least as bad, if not worse. I can only hope that things pick up.
R: L2, C7, D2.
