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Sunday, 22 June 2014

Bees on astrantia

Although there are four hives and lots of flowers in the garden the honey bees often seem to prefer to go elsewhere to forage.  However, they are very keen on the astrantia as these photos show.  They seem to prefer the red flowers to the pink or the white, perhaps because there are many more red flowers in a smaller space so foraging is more efficient.  I have perhaps about 10 square metres in flower and there were dozens of bees working the flowers.

This shows the variation in colour of my honey bees, reflecting their mongrel inheritance.


The honey bees (Apis mellifera mellifera) were accompanied by other bees, this being the leaf-cutter Megachile centuncularis featured in yesterday's blog, perhaps in better light here than yesterday.


Also on the astrantia this afternoon were buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) and tree bumblebees (Bombus hypnorum).  The worker of the latter is surprisingly small, being only about the size of the honey bee (last photo).



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3 comments:

  1. PCA29 June 2014 at 15:18

    Wonderful display of Astrantia, and glad the bees think so too. Ours have lots of bees on too.

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  2. Louise Hislop31 December 2015 at 14:07

    The bees and wasps love my Astrantia too. After your initial 3 honey bee photos, the first two solitary bee photos are of Andrena haemorrhoa female rather than Megachile, followed by a cuckoo bumblebee(patches of yellow bands between black and white hair on abdomen), either Bombus vestalis or B. bohemicus (we get both here in the NE).
    Bombus hypnorum worker bees can be very very variable in size I have found, from tiny to what you would expect of a queen in size, depending on time of year/food resources available.
    You must have a wonderful garden to have such a large patch of Astrantia!

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    1. trogtrogblog9 January 2016 at 20:30

      Thanks Louise. The photos were from 2014 when, as you can see, I was just starting to notice the bees and didn't know my Andrena from my Megachile! Things have improved slightly but I hadn't spotted the cuckoo bee. The astrantia covers about 3 or 4 square metres and is very popular with bees of all sorts. I'll keep a closer eye on them in the coming year.

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