The thistles I’ve left around the garden continue to be popular, with bumblebees as well as with leafcutters and mason bees. This is a Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), and though I don’t have a good enough photo of the hind femur to be certain, I think it’s a male. The new queens should be emerging from this year’s nests very soon, but I’d expect them to be bigger than this – at around 2cm in length they’re one of our largest and heaviest bumblebees – and more strongly marked. The males have been emerging for a little while now, and are hanging around waiting to perform their only job, which is to find a new queen from a nest other than their own, and persuade her to mate. Buff-tailed Bumblebee queens will only mate once, so this is a crucial time for the males, and they’re feeding almost frantically to keep up their energy.
There’s a good description of the Buff-tailed Bumblebee’s life cycle here, if you’d like to know more.
R and I had another visit from the Boy Wonder and his mother today, and H drove down from the Frozen North to be with us. Part way through a long, tiring, but fun day, I persuaded the Boy to come out for a walk with me so that L and H could have an uninterrupted chat with their Dad, and I’m happy to report that we made a complete exhibition of ourselves around most of the village.
“Quick!” said B. “The bear is coming! We must save all our friends!” “Oh goodness!” I said “How will we do that?” “We must warn them!” he replied. “They have to stay inside their houses until the bear is gone. Come on! Let’s go here and knock on the door!” “Don’t worry about this house,” I lied, “the people are away on holiday, so they’re safe.” “Oh, OK,” he said, “then let’s go to the next one. Quick! Come on!” So on we went, with me using increasingly silly distraction techniques to make sure we never actually got as far as anyone’s front door. After a while B’s interest seemed to be waning, and I was just starting to relax, thinking that the game was drawing to a close, when a neighbour’s shih tzu began barking at us from its balcony, and it turned out that this was ackshully the bear, and we had to run for our lives.
Reaching the end of the path across the stream, where it opened out into the drive of a housing estate, the Boy skidded to a halt, gazed around, and said in tones of great approval, “Oh! It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” He then began dancing along, singing “Jump to the left, jump to the right! Skip to the left, skip to the right!”, with me bouncing along in his wake and not having the heart to tell him that most of his rights were left, and vice versa. And so we proceeded, alternately hopping about and running from the bear, until we finally made it back to the house and discovered that we’d been away so long that a search party was on its way out to look for us. Three and a half is a great age.
R: C4, D7.
