Side tracked

Its Friday, the sun is shining, the garden is positively bursting with flowers.  So, I set out to take a photo of some of them for Flower Friday only to get side tracked by this insect. 

At first glance I thought that I was looking at a large fly, but when it settled on this leaf I could see that it was actually either a bee or perhaps a hornet of some sort.  Now that I've seen it in large I'm pretty sure that its actually a Common Mourning Bee.  Now, it may be common to some of you, but I've not seen one before, let alone taken a photo of it.

Sadly, this is not a nice insect, it actually a bee nest parasite or a ‘cuckoo bee’. She lays her eggs in the nests of hairy-footed flower bees, where the larvae eat the food stores gathered for the flower bee’s own young.  

Perhaps I should have gone with a shot of a flower instead - but as Cathy says of me "you do like a nice bug photo" ...   :-)

Later:

JDO has very helpfully pointed me in the right direction and identified that this is not the Common Mourning Bee at all, but rather a male Ashy Mining Bee - an altogether different bee with much nicer habits than the cuckoo bees.  

The things you learn on Blip! :-)