Bee gymnastics

Quite a nice day today......after baking a plum pudding cake, courtesy of Nigel Slater (I will let you know what it was like tomorrow!) I decided it was time to get to grips with our somewhat overgrown pond! It had got a bit wild over the last couple of months so needed to be cut back, thinned out and cleared of all the detritus that has accumulated in it! After I'd filled a couple of garden trugs, it was looking much better already! The sun was warm and there were lots of insects around so I nipped indoors and grabbed my camera. I watched this bee on our echinacea collecting pollen for quite a while, it was getting steadily heavier and more tired (so it looked to me). It eventually clamoured off the central cone of the plant and started to crawl around the thin petals, it's legs still thickly coated with pollen, clinging on for dear life!