'Bee'n busy today

The Safari went out in the garden and came back in sharpish - it was cold out there, well relatively compered to the last few days. We sat indoors watching the wildlife through the window so some of the pics will be a bit on the blurry side. 

Still preferring suet to worms the Blackbirds tried to dangle like Blue Tits to reach the rapidly diminishing block of fat with varying degrees of success.

The male did a little better later.

Perhaps after watching the experts doing their thing.

That Blue Tit could do with starting its moult soon, it's looking more than a bit tatty.

Once the birds went quite around lunchtime the weather bucked up a bit and we were able to get out into the garden and have some fun with the macro lens.

Common Rough Woodlouse

CR put us on to the ID of this dapper hoverfly, Eupeodes corollae

We're hoping he'll be able to help with this one too.

Platycheirus sp?

But our main quarry this afternoon wasn't hoverflies but was the Carder Bees buzzing around the pink flowered thingy-magig that runs along the inaccessible side of the pond. They're quick and they often crawl from flower to flower rather than fly seeing as how there are so many very close together.

They were a bit of a nightmare to get anything like in focus and showing their face at the same time. This little gingery bee was a lot easier being sat stock still on the top of a Foxglove flower.

We've no idea what species it is and doubt we'll be able to key it out from just one pic but we'll have a go.

We've no idea what this tiny little 'black' bee is either but it's cute.

We've never seen either of those two bees before unless the black one is the same as the little bee we saw on the Garden Bioblitz at the weekend - what do you think, same or not?

Where to next? Looks like it might be a sunny morning before the rain starts later on so we'll have a go at the garden birds first thing, hopefully the now very noisy House Sparrows will swing by.
In the meantime let us know who's bumbling around in your outback.