Gardens

A Teasel’s Life

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Bee

I don’t know how we originally came to have teasels – none of the immediate neighbours grow these giants, but the seeds must have blown in from somewhere (and we may not be popular as they blow out again each year!). They have become a bit of a fixture in our garden and a very welcome one for all sorts of wildlife.

They start off as fairly non-descript plants, forming low growing rosettes that look like they might turn into at most a thistle type of thing. They only flower in their second year, so I’m hoping the ones below, that I think overwintered, will flower this summer.

Baby Teasels

When they do put on their growth spurt, they are easily taller than me (I only manage a mere 5 foot 1 on a good day!) Their flowers are irresistible to the bees in the garden, which is the main reason we let them grow every year. These ones below are full grown ones from previous years

Bees on Teasels

Bees on Teasels 2

The stems and leaves provide homes for lots of other insects too, with water tending to collect at the base of each leaf.

We always leave them once they’ve finished flowering, as they still provide benefit right through the winter. For us humans they provide structure and interest in the garden.

Frosty teasel 2

The teasels themselves are packed with seeds that the birds love. Goldfinches are well-known teasel fans, but we’ve seen several other species such as this Coal Tit making the most of them too.

Goldfinch 1

Coal Tit on Teasel

Of course we do eventually have to chop them down, if only to provide space for next year’s crop. This year we decided to save some of the hollow stems and turn them into something useful – a Bug Hotel. The RSPB are running a “Give Nature a Home” campaign, so a pile of teasel stems and an empty squash bottle later and we have hopefully made one small home. With a bit of luck we’ll be able to post photos later in the year of some new residents.

Teasel canes

Bee Hotel

So that’s the life of the teasels in our garden – the plant that keeps on giving to wildlife – even when it’s chopped up into pieces!

 

 

Bumblebee Bonanza

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Never realised before I started writing a blog how much I enjoyed a good bit of alliteration, but  find myself unable to resist calling this post Bumblebee Bonanza. I started writing this post a few days ago when we reached a tally of 8 bee species for 2016. Since then we’ve been spotting a new one almost daily and are now up to 12. As we’re less than half way through April, I’m hopeful of further species to come, but thought I’d better finish this post off before it gets out of control!

I should point out that although we spotted all these different species, many of them were only identified with the help of several very kind and expert people on various Facebook groups – the power of social media!

So first bee of the year was of course my favourite the Hairy Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes).

 

Next to show in the garden was the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera), in small numbers so far, but hopefully by the summer the garden will be buzzing with them as usual.

Honey Bee

The next confirmed species was the first of the bumblebees – the Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris). There have been quite a few of these buzzing about, but this slightly bedraggled looking specimen was the first one to slow down enough to get photographed.  It is a social bee living in colonies usually underground.

Buff tailed bumblebee

The 4th species, the Tree Bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum) is an interesting new comer, having only been recorded in the south of England since 2001. Well it has obviously reached Malvern now! There is a scheme for recording sightings of this species, so he has been duly logged.

Tree Bumblebee

Another bumblebee to pop up in the garden this spring has been the Red Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius). This is a big bumblebee, so you think it would be easy to get a decent photo. But although we’ve seen them regularly, they seldom sit still long and when they do, they seem to favour flowers at the top of the bushes out of reach of vertically challenged photographers!

 

The 6th bee species was the first of the mining bees to be positively identified – Andrena nitida – I’m not sure this one has a common name. Mining bees are solitary bees and there are a lot of British species.

Andrena nitida

The 7th species is from an interesting group known as Cuckoo bees – the one below is the Vestal Cuckoo Bee (Bombus vestalis). Cuckoo bees behave in a similar fashion to their namesake birds – they lay their eggs in the nest of other bees. In the case of the Vestal Cuckoo Bee, its chosen host tends to be the poor Buff Tailed Bumblebee. Cuckoo bees have no pollen sacs on their legs as they have no need to collect pollen for their young, as others do all the work for them.

 

The 8th bee is the only one we’ve not managed to get to species, but according to the good people of Facebook, it belongs to the Lasioglossum genus and is another mining bee. Lasioglossum species need either microscopic examination or at least better photos than the one below to get them to species.

Lasioglossum sp

The 9th bee is the smallest specimen so far – Fabricius’ Nomad Bee (Nomad fabriciana). This is also a cuckoo type of bee, laying its eggs in the nest of mining bees. It looks quite different to the other bees we had, to the point I wasn’t even sure it was a bee at first. The yellow spots on its orange abdomen (just about visible in our photo) identify it as Fabricius’.

Fabricius Nomad Bee

Bee no. 10 is the Ashy Mining Bee (Andrena cineraria). I could tell this one was a different species as it looked black and white. Determined to get a photo I spent a long time chasing it round the garden, before it finally gave in and settled on this leaf.

Ashy mining bee Andrena cineraria

11th species and another mining bee Andrena scotica. These are solitary bees, but nest in aggregates, so they effectively have communes, rather than being properly social like Honey Bees.

Andrena scotica

The 12th and final bee so far is the Common Carder Bee (Bombus pascuorum). This fluffy gingery brown bee is a social one (although not sociable with me, I had to clamber through the undergrowth to get even this poor photo).

Common Carder Bee

So that’s our tally for the year so far. I know from previous years that there are at least 3 or 4 other species that we definitely get, so fingers crossed they reappear this year too. We garden organically at Too Lazy to Weed and I’d like to think this is contributing to the diversity of bees in our garden. That and of course the profusion of weeds!

Dunnock Dating

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The dunnocks in our garden are clearly getting frisky. They’re normally quite shy birds staying out of sight in our plentiful undergrowth, but this week I caught them displaying in a quite amazing fashion. (Look away now if you don’t want to see parts of a dunnock that are maybe best left to the imagination!)

I caught this pair outside the patio doors while I lolled on the sofa – fortunately for once a camera was within reach. As I hadn’t been anticipating a photo shoot, conditions weren’t ideal – I had to try and focus over the coffee table and dodge the cat’s scratch post; both of which obscured my view a bit, but I didn’t want to move and alert the dunnocks to my presence. So apologies if the photos aren’t quite as sharp as I’d have liked.

Dunnock pair

I thought at first the pair were just rooting about for food – and indeed that did seem to be what the male was mainly interested in. But the female started behaving very oddly. I thought at first there was something wrong with her – she seemed to be repeatedly straining her rear end (cloaca as I’ve since found out) while fluffing her feathers at the male. He didn’t seem particularly interested in her antics – can’t say I blame him, it wasn’t an attractive dance she did! The photos show her rear end in various stages of flexing (I did warn you to look away!)

Dunnock closed

Dunnock half open

Dunnock open

A quick bit of googling revealed that female dunnocks may mate with more than one male and that the males will peck at her cloaca to get her to eject the previous male’s sperm. This female seemed to be actively encouraging him to do so. I’d never heard of this behaviour, let alone seen it.  So you learn something new every day – even when just lolling about on your sofa!

Baby Blues (hopefully)

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In the last couple of weeks the posts seem to have been colour themed, first red, then yellow and now blue! The big blue news is that the Blue Tits are nesting!! So excited to see them using the bird box (the old one of course – they’ve turned their beaks up at the new deluxe one!) The brief video clip below shows both adults flying in and one exiting again. I think at this stage they were still making the nest as we saw them with nesting material.

The photo below is a still taken from the film. Hopefully things will go well for our pair and we can give updates on their progress – fingers crossed for a successful fledging and baby blue tits.

Blue Tit on Bird Box

 

The blue tones seem to be spreading round the garden too, with the emergence of several  blue hued flowers. Today I spotted these tiny Speedwell flowers hidden amongst the grasses. Not the easiest to photograph as they are so damn small. I didn’t realise they were so hairy either until I downloaded the photos.

Speedwell

And finally, no blue post would be complete without Forget-me-nots. These bright little flowers have been a favourite since I was a child (many moons ago) and are a sort of unofficial totem for Too Lazy To Weed. They spring up wherever we haven’t weeded – so pretty much over the whole garden!

Forget me not

 

Jurassic Monster!

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When you think of Jurassic, you tend to think of T. rex and possibly Richard Attenborough. Most of us don’t picture a minute micro moth, barely 2 millimetres long, but the Too Lazy garden has just that – Mompha jurassicella – a very long name for a very small moth. What’s exciting about this little moth, is that it is the first known record for Malvern.

Mompha jurasicella

We spotted it at the weekend on a primrose stem – which looks huge by comparison. You’d think being so small it would be easy to get it all in focus, but not so; it took 4 photos to get all the relevant bits sharp enough to identify it. Not that we managed to do that ourselves. Identification was courtesy of a very kind man on Facebook and an equally kind County Moth Recorder to confirm it.

Although this tiny moth has been recorded in Worcestershire, it is apparently the first record for the Malvern area, so we’re really chuffed with it. Being so small though, it’s likely lots of the local gardens have it, just that their owners don’t go grubbing about in the undergrowth looking for it! Does make you wonder what else is lurking amongst our weeds?

Hairy Footed Love

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A week or so ago I blogged about the delightfully named Hairy Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes), having spotted a male one buzzing around the garden. They are quite a loud bee, so much so, that I’m starting to recognise them by sound (going to be by new party trick – identifying bees blindfolded!) The males emerge in the Spring a bit earlier than the females so for the first week they were all we saw. The male below is a typical buff gingery colour, with of course hairy feet!

Hairy footed male

The females emerge a bit later and we saw our first one about a week after the males appeared. They look like a completely different species, being dark pretty much all over, with golden hairs on their back legs. For some reason all the females we saw seemed to be preferring the pink varieties of primrose, whereas the males had been going solely for the yellow (sexual stereotyping in bees???) In the photo below the female already has a male admirer.

Hairy footed female

I’d got the trail camera set up in the hope of catching some bee action, and could see from a distance a group of males chasing a female. I thought the trail cam was pointed right at them, but needless to say it was slightly off. So I’ve got several videos showing bits of the chase, but none capturing it completely. Hopefully the one clip below gives an idea of the action though.

To say the males were persistent would be an understatement. They harassed the long suffering female, who was only really interested in the flowers, not her admirers.

I did manage to take the freeze frame photo below from the videos – you can see one poor female, with a line of 4 males looking like they’re queuing for her attention.

Hairy footed pursuit

I also discovered that the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society are running a Spring bee recording scheme and the Hairy Footed Flower Bee is one of the species they’re interested in. So our amorous little bees have been duly logged. If anyone wants to log their own records, go to http://www.bwars.com/content/submit-sighting-anthophora-plumipes-hairy-footed-flower-bee

A Host of Golden Daffodils

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Not sure how many daffodils you need to qualify for “a host”, but what few we’ve got are at their best in the garden right now. They seem to be a lot later than everyone else’s in Malvern, the neighbours daffodils were blooming marvellous about 6 weeks ago; but better late than never.

Daffodils

Yellow is definitely this season’s colour at the moment. Some is of course down to me choosing yellow, such as these crocuses, to brighten up the cold days.

Crocuses 2

But a lot of it is due to the more natural, self seeding “weeds” such as the primroses and dandelions that proliferate in our garden.

Dandelion PrimrosesAll these spring flowers are good news for the insects, which are now starting to arrive in the garden in moderate numbers. The yellowyness of Spring continued with the first butterfly in the garden – a Brimstone. In typical Brimstone fashion it was too fast to get a photo, but we think it was a male as it was bright yellow – the original “butter coloured fly” or butterfly. Hopefully soon one will hang around long enough to get his photo taken. But the good news was that it meant I could log it onto the new online garden butterfly survey – http://www.gardenbutterflysurvey.org/ – my first record for the year.

As well as the first butterflies and bees, the first wasp put in an appearance too. It was a bit dopey and hung about on the fence, warming itself in the spring sunshine for quite a while – good news for my photography attempts. I know wasps aren’t everyone’s favourites, but close up they really are quite stunning!

Common Wasp

The Bees Knees (or Feet)

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This last week of sunshine (and showers) has brought the bees out in our garden – at least three species already, plus a massive unidentified one going like a bumblebee out of hell over the roof!

When it comes to identifying bees, it would seem a bee’s knees are hardly relevant at all. In the case of our first positively identified species this year, it was the feet that were key for the charmingly named Hairy Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes). This is one of the earliest bee species to appear in the spring and we had several merrily tucking into the primroses last weekend.

Hairy Footed Flower Bee

The second species to be spotted in the Lazy Garden was this little mining bee (Andrena sp.) seen basking on an ivy leaf in the sunshine. Unfortunately there are lots of species of mining bees and my photography wasn’t up to scratch enough to be able to identify this one. I did load it onto the ever-useful iSpot website, where several very helpful people discussed various possibilities (I would love to say “debate raged” over my bee, but that would be a bit over dramatic), before concluding that it was best to just stick with Andrena sp. rather than get it wrong. Hopefully our mining bee will reappear sometime and I can get a better photo to nail the identification.

Mining Bee Andrena sp

The final species this week was the humble, but oh so important, Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) seen here already sporting a fine set of pollen sacs. Bee populations in general are struggling so much at the moment, it was great to see 3 species at least surviving in our garden.

Honey Bee

And finally I’ve been having a go with the trail cam filming our bee friends. As per usual with the trail cam, I had to wade through quite a lot of footage of things blowing about in the wind (in this case mainly primroses) before finding this short film of our Hairy Footed Flower Bee, doing what he does best – landing on flowers with his hairy little feet!