The birds & the bees

So much has been happening since my last blog! The blue tit babies have flown the nest again without telling me. One day I could hear their hungry little squeaks – Mr & Mrs BT flying constantly back and forth with tasty morsels (they were looking quite skinny by that stage) – the next minute they’d all gone. How do they do it so secretly? I thought they would at least need a few practice flights involving some crash landings – but no, they seem to master the art of flying in a flash.

The other morning I went to retrieve the milk and eggs from the doorstep, to find carnage awaited me. Magpies had dragged the egg boxes onto the drive, managed to prise the lids open and helped themselves to several eggs. I must have disturbed them because they hadn’t quite finished their feast – what a mess. We’ve got a cool bag now for the milk people to put stuff in, although the pizza delivery man was most perturbed – he thought I’d left my handbag on the doorstep. He probably thinks I’m a forgetful old dear with poor taste when it comes to accessories!

In case you weren’t aware, 20 May was World Bee Day. Well, they obviously wanted to celebrate in style in our garden. That week I was pottering when I noticed a hole had appeared in a flower bed that runs alongside a retaining wall. It was about 18 inches long and the same deep. I thought maybe we were experiencing some kind of subsidence and not wanting the flower bed to cave in, I filled the hole with some cobbles and gravel pilfered from Grumbling Rose’s store. Very quickly, bees began emerging through the stones – they weren’t angry thank goodness, just a bit stunned looking. Wouldn’t you be if someone had just dumped a lorry load of gravel on you! I spent that evening trying to reassure GR that the bees meant no harm to us and that we should just leave them be(e). I did a quick Google and found out they were mining bees. Anyway, next day, I was just going into my Pilates class, when I had a message from Victoria – had I got hundreds of tiny wasps in my house like she and Albert had? No, I hadn’t, but my windows weren’t open. Thankfully within a few hours they had disappeared from their house. The following day I noticed not only the bees I’d seen the day before, making their way in and out of the filled in hole, but also lots of what looked suspiciously like wasps. I neglected to mention this discovery to GR, but took some photos of both varieties and hurriedly joined a wonderful FB group – BWARS (UK Bees, Wasps and Ants). Very quickly I had the answer. They were both bees. The one that looks like a typical bee is of the Andrena variety and the one that looks like a wasp is of the Nomada variety.

It gets a bit gory though because apparently the waspy looking ones are parasitic on the cuddly bee looking ones. The waspy ones lay their eggs in brood cells being prepared by cuddly mummy bee. When her eggs hatch, the larvae of the waspy one kill the larvae of the cuddly one and then eat all the food left by the cuddly mummy bee. After a few hearty meals they develop into adult waspy looking bees. Like the blue tits, it looks like they’ve all flown the nest now – I don’t suppose they’ll be choosing our garden again, not after the “welcome” I gave them!