The day of the male

Took Pepper for a walk in Pepper's Wood. We have never visited at this time of year as usually too busy. That was before we stopped working though.
We were amazed at the height of the bracken, and then delighted by the lovely patches of Hard Head Thistle, covered in bumble bees. As we observed we saw that there were many males. These are fairly easy to distinguish in the UK as they generally have rather charming yellow caps on their heads, the females don't.
Here you can see a male red-tailed bee and a male garden bumble, a worker red-tail and a common carder.
A sign of a really good summer and hopefully many queens will be hibernating with good stores of nectar.