I tried to make myself feature the humongous Common Carder queen in my second photo – I really did. But you have to learn to accept your limitations, and one of mine is that however much I love other bees – and I do – there can only ever be one absolute favourite, and for as long as they’re flying the male Plumpie is mine. It also makes me happy that I caught two of them on this patch of grape hyacinths today, because I planted these bulbs in the garden last summer. Well, I say planted: I took the contents of a couple of pots I’d bought that had wilted away to almost nothing, scraped shallow depressions in one of the borders in the back garden, and roughly trod them in – so I was even more surprised than I was pleased when they sprouted last month and then flowered.
I think I’ve probably told you every single thing I know about Hairy-footed Flower Bees by this point – several times, probably – but Steven Falk has more on the Common Carder Bee here, including a useful crib sheet on the second page to help with distinguishing them in the field from the UK’s other two similar species. This is perhaps more important to me than it may be to other people, because we also get Bombus humilis here (the Brown-banded Carder Bee), and they’re not that easy to tell apart.
The other nice thing that happened today was that when R and I went for our post-dinner walk around the village, a bat flew down the lane above us, and for a few seconds seemed to be actually keeping us company. It was the first one I’ve seen this year, though I’ve been happily aware since being told by the pest control man that we have a winter bat roost in the loft, that just because I’m not seeing them it doesn’t mean they’re not around. He left them strictly alone, for legal as well as ecological reasons, and obviously, so do R and I. As to what type of bat we have, I really couldn’t say, except that the one we saw in the dusk tonight seemed quite big. I’m tempted to get a bat detector, though It’s hard to know what level of use one would get out of such a thing, as a merely curious amateur. Still… it would be good to know.
R: L2, C7, D4.
