Breathe In And Out...

By ScotNatureBoy

Cuckoo, cuckoo?

Sitting waiting for the delayed Sleeper for a rare work trip to London, I can ensure that this need not be a backblip! We had a beautiful, bright sunny day in Stirling, the (miraculous) third in a row! As usual, we walked Ella in the King's Park this morning and I found this rather sluggish bumblebee feeding on ragwort nectar. Nothing unusual, except that I haven't seen many bumblebees for a couple of weeks (note the dearth in my blip timeline, for example). I'm on a kind of a mission, to try to photograph all of our British bumblebee species using my phone camera (and blip them as they come up, of course!). This started as an unintended consequence of a remark by my friend Jonny Hughes of Scottish Wildlife Trust about one of my early bumblebee blips and I thought: "Why not?" And so, slight excitement today as I think this is a new one (a newbie, if you'll allow the pun!). If I'm correct, the colouration/ banding and the completely hairy hind legs probably make this a field cuckoo bee, Bombus campestris. Cuckoo bees are parasitic/ predatory on the nests and individuals of true bumblebee burrows and colonies. This particular cuckoo-bee species attacks a range of bumblebee species, probably including carder bees. I'm slightly sad to think that bumblebees will soon be gone for winter! What am I going to blip about then?

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