Hmmm, bees again! But this time it’s bumblebees and honey bees. Have you noticed the flying stripy golf balls whizzing around the garden at the moment. They sound like mini helicopters and are most like queen bumblebees.
These will have hibernated over the winter and are now busy making a nest, making stores and feeding their babies.
Before long the little bumblies will be flying around collecting pollen and nectar too.
It’s fascinating to watch these creatures visiting the flowers in the garden.
Some flowers are better suited to bumblebees rather than honey bees, most of the legume flowers are pretty inaccessible to honeybees, but my greenhouse peach is a magnet for both.
Actually it’s on the patio at the moment, well during the day at least. I’ve been moving it outside mid morning and taking it back into the greenhouse mid-afternoon.
It’s probably confusing for the little buzzers, but it protects the delicate flowers at this critical stage. But more importantly the flowers are being properly pollinated by pollinating insects.
Fat fluffy bumblebees have been crawling all over the open blooms, while the stripy honeybees have been buzzing from flower to flower.
They don’t seem to mind each other and are sharing the booty, perhaps that’s another lesson we need to learn from nature.
