You may be thinking by now that there’s nothing else I can possibly say about Hairy-footed Flower Bees, but it’s taken me nearly three weeks to get this photo, so there’s absolutely no way I wasn’t going to post it.
Unlike last year, when the Plumpies couldn’t get enough of the two containers of grape hyacinths I’d placed on the patio wall, this year there I’ve only had a couple of takers, and up till today they’ve seemed quite determined that I shouldn’t even look at them, let alone point a camera in their direction. So when I caught them feeding late this afternoon, and they were distracted enough by each other to let me get in close with the macro, I took full advantage. And despite the flash, which tends to distort the colour of flowers in ways I find hard to unpick, I was pretty pleased with the results.
I’ve added another couple of photos today. The first shows four of the five male Hairy-feet who were closely following a female around the secret garden this morning; it’s only a record shot (when I paused to adjust the camera settings to try to get the whole group in focus, I missed the moment when they all pushed off elsewhere), but it shows the behaviour quite well. I’m always intrigued that newly-emerged females seem to get a period of grace during which the males don’t notice them, before they suddenly become fascinating – after which they can expect to be stalked and pounced on at regular intervals, for as long as they males are still around. This is based purely on my own observation: I’ve never seen anything about it in any species account, so I can only theorise that the females’ smell changes in some way when they’re ready to mate.
As far as I know female Plumpies only mate once, but that doesn’t stop the males from pursuing them with an increasing appearance of desperation, as their own season moves towards its inevitable close. And my third photo today also comes from the folder titled You Can’t Blame a Boy for Trying, because it shows a male Plumpie preparing to pounce on a Buff-tailed Bumblebee queen. Obviously his advances were rebuffed – she, being newly-emerged from hibernation and still quite dozy, had more than enough problems on her plate, without the inappropriate cross-species attention of some random bloke (insert your own joke here, ladies) – but given that a female Hairy-footed Flower Bee is largely black with ginger points, and the Buff-tailed queen was working the same general look, I think his error was forgivable.
My other big bee news of the day was the appearance in the front garden this morning of the first Tawny Mining Bee (Andrena fulva) of the season. I adore these scarlet creatures, but this one was rapidly on to me being on to her, and thwarted my attempts to get more than a distant record shot by flying over and landing on the barrel of my lens. I was still trying to ease the camera into a position from where I could photograph her with my phone when she took off and disappeared, not to be seen again for the rest of the day. I also had a female Yellow-legged Mining Bee today (Andrena flavipes), which I thought was a Buffish Mining Bee until Obsidentify put me straight. I then got what I thought was the first Chocolate Mining Bee of the season, only to be told by the same (generally reliable) app that it was a female Trimmer’s Miner (Andrena trimmerana). Steven Falk says that in distinguishing the two species, a reddish base to the abdomen suggests A. trimmerana – which I think confirms the day’s final score at JDO 0:2 Obsidentify. Just when you thought you were beginning to get reasonably good at this stuff, you find yourself thinking that you should perhaps revisit a chunk of old and unverified records, and maybe change a few…
R: L2, C6, D19.
