Hardly Any Butterflies or Bees?

I seem to remember I did a post in April a couple of years ago entitled "Loads of Bees."  Well the ongoing cold and damp spell has met that the exact reverse has been true and only now looks likely to improve.

There was a single small tortoiseshell on a group bike ride up the coast (cut short due to muddy conditions) but the only sighting in the garden has been a single red admiral fly past several weeks ago.  Elsewhere there was one unidentified white by the Tyne on Saturday and that's all.

Apart from the odd honey bee, bees have fared scarcely any better and this all in spite of forget-me-nots being in full flower and a reasonable recovery by the garlic mustard, which seems a pity.

Up until Friday last week all I had seen worth noting was a queen wasp which took up brief residence in the summer house and a couple of visits from bee imitators.

Queen Wasp

Beefly

Tapered Dronefly

I think I'm right about the tapered dronefly, also having had a common dronefly to compare it with.

Then of Friday, a little rare sunshine produced a bit of a turnaround.  As well as usual visitors in the shape of tree bumblebee, common carder bee and buff-tailed bumblebee, I was particularly pleased to see a tawny mining bee on garlic mustard a couple of times.  I did think I'd seen one in the front garden last year but it was too brief a sighting to be certain.

Tawny Mining Bee

I thought I'd seen a buffish mining bee on dandelion about a week ago but the mobile phone photo was too poor to be sure but one turned up in the garden on Friday.  It is of course the most common mining bee.

Also notable was a large early bumblebee.

Buffish Mining Bee

Early Bumblebee

It is interesting to think that in spite of the overall paucity of bee species, early bumblebee has turned up more often than usual.  I reckon I've seen four already.

The obvious missing party in all this however is the red mason bee, which was around in big numbers last year when I was confident several nested in my bug hotel.  Maybe it's not checkout time yet.

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.

After a slight delay..

Unfortunately nature activities have been suspended over the past month due to a bereavement followed by a loss of broadband connection, broken boiler and lengthy powercut in the wake of Storm Arwen.

As a result I've seen very little beyond what has turned up around the garden.  I only got out on one trip, a bike ride to Corbridge when, after seeing a single low-hovering kite early on, I spent some time peering into someone else's garden.  Apart from trying to transform a chaffinch into a brambling as someone once amusingly put it, there was nothing of any significance.  

There hasn't been that much in my garden anyway.  A couple of weeks back I glimpsed a queen wasp

Long-tailed tits

passing by the mahonia but no early bumblebees, which might have been a possibility.

I've spent some time thinking about the long-tailed tits and how gregarious and shy they are.  I moved the suet balls they obviously like onto the plum tree to see if they would come closer.  Apart from one occasion they didn't so I put them back near the fence and about six visited shortly afterwards.  It's a case of feast or famine though.

For a while a dunnock with no tail visited the bird table, moving uptypically slowly. The first time it even stayed there motionless for about an hour.  Presumably it had been attacked.

A wren has also visited on a couple of occasions.

My occasional visitors have sometimes noticed tawny owls calling from the trees by the stream.  I don't usually but there was one evening, quite early, when there was one calling from fairly close by.

A sighting of a furtive jay in the same area had me wondering if one would visit the garden again, but nothing so far.

Monday 14th December

Some slightly strange if not exactly world-shattering happenings this week...

I'd just finished discussing the 'not quite right' greenfinch mentioned in my last post with someone by email when what was obviously a female greenfinch turned up on the peanut feeder, to be succeeded by the 'not quite right' one which fed off the decking for a few minutes with me thinking it was a chaffinch, then visiting the feeder and revealing the same plumage features I photographed last time. I haven't seen it since.

Nuthatch

A very frequent visitor to the feeders has been this male nuthatch, which has to my pleasure also started visiting the bird table and fighting off the coal tits and others.  I wondered if he would also scare off the rather aggressive robin who clearly regards the bird table as his personal possession.  On the one occasion they did meet up, the robin won somewhat against my perception that in such confrontations, the larger bird will prevail.  Maybe in this situation the redder bird prevailed but I look forward to seeing if the same result occurs the next time.

Shortly after a session watching the nuthatch and more coal tit aerial acrobatics, I was amazed to see a grey wagtail land on the bird table.  It didn't stay long but I couldn't help wondering what it was after as they don't eat seeds.  Maybe it got a whiff of the rather smelly soldier beetle larvae I've been adding to the birdfeed lately.  One awaits developments.  There was another grey wagtail around near Swalwell today so perhaps they get a bit more adventurous in winter.

The next minor shock came when I went to close the bathroom window yesterday and a queen wasp crawled in.  Apparently they can live for a year, but a wasp active in December??  I should probably have taken a photo but decided to usher it out as soon as possible as I don't want a wasp's nest in the bathroom for Christmas.

I did do an ettempted twitch on Friday as a whimbrel had been reported in the Cambois area and I've never seen one.  On returning home with so to speak empty binoculars I had to recognise that I'd been looking in the wrong area in spite of having seen a fairly clear map!  The whimbrel hasn't been reported

Young Deer

since so probably had moved on anyway.

What was slightly strange about that trip was that on driving out of Greenside several deer ran across the road in front of and behind. I was lucky not to hit one.  Then at Cambois the only thing I did see (apart from one hovering kestrel) was a young deer happliy grazing away on what was blatantly a brownfield site.

Today I have enjoyed watching a squad of half a dozen long-tailed tits invade the garden.  Nothing strange about that though...