Brace position

This is the best year for Common Mourning Bees that I ever remember - the males, at least, of which I have at least four currently patrolling the top garden. I haven't yet seen a female, but I'm quite sanguine about that, because they lay their eggs in the nests of Hairy-footed Flower Bees, and I'd very much rather they didn't. 

When not zooming about and trying to jump the female plumpies (which are black, to be fair, so could easily be mistaken for a female Melecta albifrons if you were feeling either dozy or over-enthusiastic), the males spend a fair amount of time just sitting around on plants. Quite often they seem to be asleep, as I've noted several times already this season, but when awake they tend to adopt rather extreme positions such as this, with the back legs splayed and braced. Presumably this helps them to effect a quick take-off if they see either a female or a rival, but it looks rather strange. Given the naturally hunched appearance of the species, and the casual way this individual is resting a foreleg on the edge of the leaf, he looks to me like an old farmer, leaning over a gate to check his livestock.

All the photos I managed to take today were grabbed during a quick scuttle around the garden at about 11am - think of it as the invertebrate version of Supermarket Sweep - before R and I went off to Slimbridge to meet up with L and bring the Boy Wonder home for the weekend. We hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks and had missed him hugely, and from his broad grin and enthusiastic waving as his mother pulled in next to us in the WWT car park, I think he might have missed us too. He's been delightful all afternoon, and if it was harder than usual to get him to bed tonight, I'm going to put it down to him having fallen in love with the three Mick Inkpen Kipper stories I picked up in a remainder shop the other day. Nearly thirty years on from these books having been favourites of his mother and uncle, it was lovely to find that they haven't lost their power to charm small children.