Pollen mining

With the unusually warm April and May we've experienced, it seems as though my spring solitary bees have lived fast and died young: there are plenty of bumblebees in the garden right now, but for the past week or  so I've seen virtually no miners, no mason bees at all, and only a couple of female Hairy-footed Flower Bees. At the weekend I was moaning about this to R, and I mentioned that there's one mining bee I expect to record here in late spring which I hadn't seen at all this year.

Two days later, here she is: the Large Meadow Mining Bee (Andrena labialis). At least, I'm pretty sure that's what we're looking at, though she's so plastered with pollen that some of her distinguishing features are a bit hard to see. Falk says: "Females are large and robustly-built with a short brown pile on top of the thorax, pale and conspicuous facial fovea, and a short pale pile on the tergites with buffish-white hair fringes along the hind margins of tergites 2-4. The tergites are dulled by very dense punctures." That all sounds about right, though you can't see the facial foveae in the main image. These are small depressions on the faces of some bees, between the inner edges of the eyes and the antennal insertions, which are usually covered with short, velvety hair. In the Large Meadow Mining Bee though, the pale depression is covered with quite extravagant tufts of golden hair - you can see this in some of Stven Falk's images, and also in my second photo.

Andrena labialis is a locally common species across southern England, but the Midlands marks the northern limit of its range - there are very few records from the north of England, and it hasn't yet appeared in Scotland or Ireland. It flies from May to July, and its preferred foodplants are legumes such as vetches, clovers and bird's-foot-trefoils. This female is foraging from my pyracantha, which has appreciated the dry spring and is currently almost groaning under its burden of pollen-rich blossom. 

Finally, I'd like to say that I'm very grateful for all of your kind and generous responses to my 11th blipversary yesterday. Thanks to you all.