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Observation.org identified her as a red mason bee. I don't know. Question b is if she tries to warn me, by lifting her middle leg, or if she is just very agile.
One of our hives swarmed and landed conveniently in our mulberry tree. Nice and easy to collect. A local man stopped by and asked if he could have them as he used to keep bees back in Lebanon. We were happy to find a home for this lot.
One of the first images I shot with my new Canon 60mm f2.8 Macro lens. Taken in the back garden on a bright summer afternoon. Hmm.
Yes, so we try to return to our relationship again... me, my garden and its inhabitants. I had an unfortunate fall about a month ago and hurt my shoulder badly. Now the damage from that accident has recovered to the extent that I can comfortably hold my camera.
A stekel of some kind (?) is the first individual to my humble delight to model like this after the new reckoning of time...
The questions continue...
You might remember this little hole in a fence post at St Cyrus. A few weeks ago, I'd noticed a couple of male leafcutter bees on these posts, so on another visit I looked for nest holes in the posts, and was thrilled to find one occupied hole, but was then surprised to see that it was occupied not by a bee, but by a digger wasp (`Flick' back about 10 images in my stream). Since then, when I've been at St Cyrus, I've keenly looked in on the digger wasp as I passed; it was there every day I checked. Yesterday, after a break of about 6 days, I think, I was back and checked the post to find not the digger wasp but a cute bee in the same hole! Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, so this is a quick snap on my phone.
I'm curious about what's gone on here; could they both be using the same hole?; did the wasp move out naturally, and then the bee moved in?; did the bee evict the wasp?; is one a parasite?; are they both nesting?; was one or both using it as shelter?
I'm also not sure what type of bee this is. The leafcutters I saw (a few photos in my recent uploads) have now been kindly IDd by the expert Steven Falk, as one of the rarer leafcutters, the black-headed leafcutter bee (Megachile circumcincta). This could be a female (according to his book, they usually nest in sandy ground, but have also been reported to nest in wood), but that's a wild guess.
So much to learn :D