Magnet

While R was pushing a napping grandchild around the park this afternoon, I went on an invertebrate hunt. The spring bedding has been dug up and all the flower beds are standing empty, waiting for the summer planting scheme to go in, so there was nothing to be found there, and for quite a while nothing much anywhere else either. I'd worked my way through and around most of a large shrub border, quietly cursing the topsy-turvy spring weather that seems to have upset the normal insect calendar, and thinking I know invert numbers are way down, but surely there should be more on the wing in a sunny urban park on June 1st than this??

And then I found it: the magnet that was pulling them all in. This red-leaved ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius), which is around eight feet tall and similarly wide, was covered in clusters of pretty pink and white flowers, and the flowers were absolutely humming with bees and flies. They all seemed to be on a sugar high from the nectar, and there was quite a lot of pushing and shoving going on for possession of the best flowers, so I was lucky to catch this lovely fresh male Bombus pratorum with nothing else crowding the shot, and at an instant of near-stillness before he zoomed away to a different flower head.

As befits its common name of the early bumblebee, Bombus pratorum tends to finish its first nesting cycle in the late spring, the appearance of these lovely males being followed by the emergence of new queens. These will mate, and the queens will then found their own nests, allowing a second generation of males and queens to be produced in late summer. Once mated, the second generation queens will hibernate, and emerge in early spring next year to begin the cycle again.