Marshmallow

Quite a bit of the Boy Wonder's morning was spent in our kitchen, helping us to wrap his Daddy's birthday presents - both the rock cookies we made yesterday, and the gifts R and I had bought for G - and a very short amount of time was spent this afternoon, in the café at Tredegar, 'helping' Daddy to unwrap them. I wasn't able to preserve much of the lovingly potato-printed paper around the cookies (though we still have a strip of it at our house, inserted into one of the snack baskets by the Boy, who asked rather plaintively if we'd please leave it there "for ever"), but I made sure to point out the amount of work B had done on the other presents, which looked like the aftermath of a small explosion in a Magic Tape factory.

After present wrapping, and before lunch and setting off back to Wales, the Boy and I went on another bug hunt. It was a nicer day than yesterday, and I didn't think we'd need to beat anyone from their roosts, so I merely set a challenge: who could find the most 7-spot ladybirds? As B's competitive instinct verges on the pathological, this allowed the two of us to rampage around the garden for the best part of an hour, and gave R (whose back problem is proving worryingly intractable) a much-needed break.

The family reunion at Tredegar was touchingly enthusiastic, marred only by the fact that B minor was sadly colicky. I've come to quite admire the furious temper my younger grandson can display: there's not all that much a 3-month old baby can do to make his presence felt, but this one looks like Bryn Terfel and has the lungs to match, and when he kicked off in the café no-one else could hear themselves think, let alone speak. Desperate to shut him up before we were all asked to leave, I launched into Show Me the Way to Go Home, and was quickly joined in 3-part almost-harmony by R and the Boy Wonder. To my surprise it worked - perhaps B-minor was so occupied in trying to work out which one of us was singing flat that he temporarily forgot his tummy ache - and I can only hope that as far as the other patrons were concerned, this racket was an improvement on the previous one. 

This is one of the commoner nomad bees, Nomada marshamella, but I was still pleased to capture her on camera this morning because she was my first of the season. She's similar to the other common yellow and black species, Nomada goodeniana, but has well-separated yellow spots on the second abdominal tergite, rather than a continuous yellow band. Females have solid orange antennae, while the males' antennae have variable black markings towards the base. The Nomadas are kleptoparasites of various species of mining bee, but of the species I know are present in my garden, N. marshamella is most probably preying on the nests of Andrena scotica or Andrena trimmerana. My personal mnemonic for this species is that the brown tegulae (the small plates covering the wing insertions, which are yellow in Nomada goodeniana), look a bit like toasted marshmallows.