Resting

I've spent most of the day at my desk, tackling the raw file mountain that (as ever) is threatening to collapse and bring down the house. The fun part (if anything to do with Lightroom can ever be said to resemble fun) was selecting a hundred or so images from the vast number of photos I took on Thursday of the Boy Wonder dancing, and handing on the jpegs to R so that he can turn them into an AV. In an ideal world, of course, I'd have skilfully flipped the R5 from stills to video and simply filmed the Boy, but I was barely competent at filming with the old DSLR cameras I had for so many years that I knew them inside out, and while I'm getting on fine with my new mirrorless gear, thus far I haven't even glanced at the video sections of the manuals.

In the interests of not actually fusing to my desk stool, I walked around the garden for half an hour or so at lunchtime, checking to see what was about. The answer to this question was not much, actually, so I was especially pleased when this Megachile willughbiella flew in and sat down on one of the flowers of the perennial pea. I don't know what she was doing - she really should have been working on a nest, but didn't seem to be interested in either feeding or foraging - but it was kind of her to display the black hair at the distal end of her pollen brush that firmly identifies the species.

Megachile willughbiella doesn't seem to have many enemies, apart from the sharp-tailed bee Coelioxys elongata, which is a kleptoparasite of the nest, rather than attacking the adult bee, and in any case is very scarce in the Midlands. All bees get old and tired, of course, and none has a long life span, but this female still looks quite fresh, and seemed perfectly healthy. So perhaps she'd just decided that Sunday was to be her day of rest.