Fork-tailed Flower Bee

Today was overcast and quite cold, and very few invertebrates seemed to want to be out and about. The black horehound along the old wall at Tilly's field was empty of Wool Carders, but a few hardy Common Carders and Buff-tailed Bumblebees were working among the flower spikes - as well as something else. Despite having fairly dodgy pitching myself, I'm pretty good at picking up the buzzing pitch of different kinds of bee, and it bothered me for quite a while that there was something deep in the horehound patch that was vibrating at a different frequency to the bumblebees I'd already seen, but I couldn't spot it or work out what it was.

Eventually it emerged, and I realised immediately that it was a Fork-tailed Flower Bee, Anthophora furcata - smaller and drabber than its Hairy-footed cousin (though the males have similar yellow faces), and flying somewhat later in the season. Both sexes have a pair of tiny projections at the tip of the abdomen, which frankly you'd have to have quite a vivid imagination to see as a forked tail, and the very tip of the female's abdomen draws extra attention to itself by being a deep orangey red colour.

According to Steven Falk this is the most widespread of the UK's Anthophora species, possibly because it's able to exploit a very wide range of habitats, from brownfield sites to wetlands. Favoured foods include mints and dead nettles - in my garden hedge woundwort is the main attraction - and the females build their nests in dead wood. These are restless and nippy little bees, and given that I didn't have the light for a fast shutter speed I was lucky to catch this female in flight.