Spring fresh

I have two lovely fresh female mining bees for you today, both photographed in the brief window of opportunity between our last weekend guests leaving in sunshine at lunch time, and the weather closing in less than an hour later. The main image is an orange-tailed mining bee, Andrena haemorrhoa (also sometimes called the early mining bee), which I found resting on top of a slumpy narcissus flower; and the extra is a tawny mining bee, Andrena fulva, who was lounging on a leaf of one of the red valerian plants on top of the front garden wall. It seemed unlikely that neither had yet mated, especially as I've photographed males of both species here already, but there was no sign that either of them had been working on a nest, which caused me to examine them as closely as I could. Although her wings were hiding her abdomen I have a sad suspicion that the orange-tailed bee may have been stylopised, which would explain her passivity; but happily the tawny miner looked fine, so maybe she was just so new she hadn’t yet managed to draw the attention of any potential mates.

At breakfast this morning the Boy Wonder received two (parentally sanctioned) Easter gifts from his doting oldies, and seemed hardly to be able to believe that all this chocolate actually belonged to him, and no-one was trying to confiscate it. After biting the ears off a small Lindt rabbit (apparently one is born knowing that this is the correct way to begin) he set it aside and moved on to a little bag of individually foil-wrapped, solid chocolate eggs, and soon found himself in a dilemma: get Grandma to unwrap them all so he could cram them in his mouth as quickly as possible, or keep them as a Collection? I spotted some time ago that he has the soul of a collector, but I was still surprised that after eating just three he moved on to admiring and playing with the remainder. L, who had predicted that given free rein he would self-regulate his chocolate intake, was just a little smug to be proved right.

R and I had decided in advance that B was still too young this year for an Easter egg hunt, but he rapidly devised his own by repeatedly dropping one or more of his little treasures and having them roll away under the furniture, from where they had to be tracked down and retrieved. I tried to stop this happening by giving him a small plastic box with a screw-on lid to keep them in, but merely added extra layers of complexity to the game: getting the lid on and off the box required spatial awareness, manual dexterity and large amounts of concentration, and moving the eggs back and forth between the box and its inverted domed lid involved the favoured pastime known to all parents of Montessori-educated offspring as teeming and ladling. During which the eggs, of course, still kept escaping and having to be rounded up. Much as I love the Boy, if I never see either the eggs or the box again, I’ll be well able to bear the disappointment.