Thief

Imagine my surprise and delight when I found not one, not two but three blue banded bees buzzing around my salvia this morning.  It indicates to me that there is not much food around for them at the moment.  I am glad I went to the trouble to plant so many food plants for critters.

I called this one a thief because it shows interesting behaviour in the bee world.  Rather than going to all the trouble of crawling down the tube of the flower, they go to the back of the flower head and drill down through the petals directly into the bit that interests them and that's the nectar.

Thus the flower is doubly deprived.  Both of the nectar and of the pollen distribution which it depends on for setting seed.

In extras there is an image of the bee in flight.  Sadly it's flying away from the camera.  Full frontal in flight shots are quite hard to get.

Thanks so much for all the lovely comments, and stars and stuff for my shoes shot yesterday.  Let's see what we get next week.