Busy

R and I did some heavy gardening today, pruning several large (and in the case of a Banksia rose, vicious) shrubs. It was so warm that the honey bees came out in force, scrambling around the crocuses, snowdrops and hellebores, and there were dozens of small blue-green leafhoppers pinging around the evergreens where they'll have been overwintering.

By this point in February I'm on solitary bee watch, but I didn't find any today despite some diligent searching. As compensation though, there were a couple of Bombus terrestris queens flying slowly and noisily around the garden, looking for nesting sites and occasionally stopping to refuel. This one bounced a honey bee off the little pot of hyacinths I picked up the last time R and I were at the garden centre, which was making itself very useful today as a refreshment station.

This is the first bumblebee I've photographed this year, and my second photo shows another seasonal first: I've been checking our hazel trees for a couple of weeks now for the appearance of their tiny red female 'flowers', but today was the first time I managed to find some. Although they're generally described as flowers, each of these clusters of sticky red protrusions is actually composed of the styles of several flowers, which develop together inside a bud. I described this in more detail in a post I wrote last spring, when the hazel flowered a fortnight earlier than it has this year. I guess it must have been held back by the cold spells we had during December and January, but it's certainly romping away now.