May Day Bank Holiday Weekend Round Up
- Sarah Marshall
- May 9, 2018
- 2 min read
With the mini heatwave we had over the bank holiday weekend, the garden seems to have exploded into life. Luckily I was able to spend most of the weekend at home and outside so I had a great view of everything that was going on!
Firstly I set up the trail camera by the hanging bird feeders. I’m experimenting using close up filters with the trail camera for a closer view. It’s early days yet and I need to find a way to get the filters closer to the lens as I am getting some weird reflections / refractions, but all the same I am really pleased with the results so far!
Crenova Trail Cam + Polaroid 37mm 1x Close Up Filter
The male Red Mason bees continued to emerge. The older males spend their time mainly patrolling the outside of the bee houses waiting for a female to emerge –
As soon as they see movement from within a cell they dive onto the emerging bee. At the moment the females have yet to hatch, so it is other males they are usually divebombing and a small scuffle ensues. After one of these I found this poor chap on the floor, a little worse for wear as his wing seemed to have been damaged.
I also noticed a female Orange Tailed Mining Bee (Andrena haemorrhoa) on the lawn and attempting to dig!
We are getting Mining Bees in the garden a lot at the moment – they never seem to nest here though as I suspect the soil isn’t to their liking being clay-based. For an upcoming project I’m going to try setting up a planter for them if I can work out how to get the soil a bit drier first – watch this space!
On Sunday morning, I saw a flash of blue out of the corner of my eye. It turned out to be a Holly Blue butterfly! I’ve never had any of the blue butterflies visit the garden before so I was very pleased – and I saw it sporadically for the rest of the weekend when it seemed to be patrolling our garden and the one that backs onto it. I hope this is a sign that it is going to stick around!
Having learned that the hedgehog is still around, I put some food out and set the trail cam up to see if it visited. I didn’t capture the hedgehog, but the food did not go to waste –
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