We have lift off...

Things have really taken off on the nature front in the last few days, in particular the insect world.

Bee flies started to appear on the newly flowering plants and an increasing number of bumblebee queens passed through the garden without stopping.  Then a few days ago bees started to turn up and linger. I got a brief sighting of what looked very much like a tawny mining bee while hunting for weeds around the laurel hedge.  It didn't hang around for more than a couple of seconds but the bright orange coat was pretty much a giveaway.

Yesterday I went down Blaydon Burn to a meeting in town and caught a glimpse of a male orange tip and another small orange butterfly out of my eye.  I wondered about a very early small copper but dismissed it as unlikely.  Anyway I vowed to take a much more careful look on my way back.

As soon as I reached the Burn there was another male orange tip and about sixty yards up the track a struggling queen bee that puzzled me considerably as I couldn't match it at first to any known UK species.  It was only when I looked at the photos I gradually spotted it was a buff-tailed bumblebee with an almost non-existent thorax band.  You can barely see the band at all.

Buff-tailed Bumblebee Queen

As I moved up the burn the number of male orange tip sightings reached five, none of them showing any sign of settling.  My guess is that they were on the lookout for females and this was partially confirmed when a couple of them made overtures to other whites, who quickly saw them off.  I suppose that if you are a male orange tip, it makes sense to get on the wing a bit before the females hatch so you can catch them early.

There were also a couple of peacocks and I got the typical early season shot of a nice new specimen sunning itself on the track.

Peacock

I think that most of the whites I have seen flying past to date have been large whites and this was partially confirmed when I found one trapped in my summerhouse this morning.  It happily sat on my finger for thirty seconds while I escorted it from the premises.  It was clearly a female.

Large White

They don't usually have such a creamy body colour, perhaps the result of struggling on the window pane.

A healthy number of bees and some imitators are now visiting the forget-me-nots and garlic mustard at the bottom of the garden.  There have been tree bumblebees, carder bees, buff-tailed bumblebees and one garden bumblebee, most but not all of them queens.  Possibly the most numerous of the rest have been male red mason bees.  One was even sighted crawling out of a hole in the summer house planks.

Red Mason Bee

But there have also been a couple of bees that I have struggled to identify for certain. The trouble with insects is their seasonality so that you have a large part of the year to forget all you've learned about them.  

A nomad bee has been turning up over the past few days and it looked smaller than the Gooden's Nomad Bees I have seen before.  The plot thickened when I saw what I first thought was a fly but on inspection may well be a chocolate mining bee, which would suggest the nomad was in fact a Marsham's.

Using my latest field guide however, I think the answer is that the nomad was a male Gooden's (hence the smaller size) but that chocolate mining bee may well be a correct identification.

Gooden's Nomad Bee

Chocolate Mining Bee?

A couple of further yellow invaders have also occurred.  One is clearly a queen wasp but the stray yellow plant unaccountably growing in one of my plant pots had me wondering a bit.  On phoning a friend, we think it must be oil-seed rape!

Queen Wasp

Oil-seed Rape

Incidentally I also have a sweet pea in the front garden that has survived the winter and started flowering again about a fortnight ago.

Last of all I wondered into the kitchen to see a spherical object lying on the bird table that was promptly removed by a jackdaw, leaving me to wonder whether it was the jackdaw or another bird that left the egg there in the first place.