buzzing while the tea burns

Since picking up a leaflet about bumblebees at Allanton on Saturday, I've been looking at them more closely. I always thought that there was only one kind of bumblebee, but it turns out that 24 species live in the UK alone.

Here is a Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) on the sage flowers in our greenhouse. This is a long tongued bee, and so it can get the nectar from deep flowers. Other types of bumblebee, with shorter tongues, favour sorts of flowers where the nectar is easier to reach. They all prefer simple, cottage-garden flowers to the highly cultivated bedding plant varieties.

I had decided to blip a bumblebee today and thought I would nip out to the garden for a quick photo while the supper cooked. But bees only stay on one flower for a few seconds at a time. I had a whole lot of pictures of blurry bumblebees and the supper was nearly overdone. I'm quite happy with this cropped one, though.