Butterflies by Bike

I did think while writing my last post a couple of days ago that things could only get better and it proved to be the case.

Anticipating a fearsome 18C forecast I decided to make my weekly trip to Washington Sports Centre by bike on Tuesday, hoping that Cycle Track 7 would yield a few promising spots in spite of some gusty blasts of wind. 

It was only in the Pelton area that I came across a junction with a footpath that was surrounded by dandelions and immediately stopped to have a nose around.  Almost immediately I was elated to catch sight of my first orange tip of the year. During the whole trip I counted eight of them, all males and none of them settling as presumably on the hunt for females. Some of them were extremely small, suggesting under-nourishment. Also spotted later were a single red admiral and a single small tortoiseshell warming themselves on the path.

Anyway it was more the thought of bees that caused me to stop at Pelton and I soon found about five hawthorn mining bees nectaring on the dandelions.  The i-record website where I posted photos of them doesn't believe that an amateur like me can reliably identify a hawthorn mining bee.  Having however  seen them on a guided walk by the River Wansbeck, I'm confident I was right... and anyway there were at least three hawthorns nearby!

On the other side of the footpath, I caught sight of a massive bumblebee on the dandelions.  Dim memories of past years recurred and I reckoned it might be a cuckoo. Research in my trusty bee book suggested that it was indeed a gypsy cuckoo bumblebee though it would have to be admitted that the vestal cuckoo bumblebee is extremely similar.

Hawthorn Mining Bee

Gypsy Cuckoo Bumblebee

As you can see the size difference is fairly apparent. I actually saw some smaller bumblebees with similar markings to the cuckoo but dismissed them as buff-tailed bumblebees without an abdominal yellow stripe, which can sometimes happen.

After wrongly thinking I'd seen a rare ladybird, the next stop was by a bridge nearing Washington, where a good head of campions appeared.  However it was again the dandelions that produced something notable in the form. I think, though again disputed by the i-record website, they were a group of mini miners.

Mini Mini Miners?

Now the only mini miner that is mentioned by the trusty bee book as occurring in this area of the North East is the impunctate mini miner, so it could well be that these are they. However you can see that they are so small that they are almost totally buried by the wee dandelion petals and it is only the occasional antenna sticking up that suggests they might be bees at all.  But wasps also have antennae...

Perhaps inspired by all this I spent a fair bit of time in the garden yesterday.

Buffish mining bee turned up again as did tree bumblebee.  I may also have seen a single red mason bee but the photo I got is too blurry to tell. Slightly more exciting was rescuing a green shield bug from a bucket of water and even more exciting than that was seeing my first nomad bee of the year.

Green Shield Bug

Gooden's Nomad Bee

Again in conflict with i-record, I am confident about identifying Gooden's nomad bee, as several photographs showed no sign of red on the abdomen that would have suggested other locally occurring nomads - and it predates on the buffish mining bee.

Still no sign of butterflies here though.