21st June, 2014
It is midsummer's day and for once it really feels like midsummer. We have enjoyed nearly two weeks of warm, dry, sunshiny days - with the promise of at least four more to come. Everyone is happy apart from the grass behind the house which doesn't look as green as it was a week ago and would prefer a nice heavy shower.
It should have been be a good opportunity to relax and contemplate John Lubbock's wise words - "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time”. But I seem to have spent half the week annoying bumblebees in a vain attempt to teach myself how to identify the various species which visit our garden.
I hoped it would be easy because there are only six common species. Most of them have three stripes, one on the thorax and two on the abdomen. The common names of three varieties refer to the colour of the hairs at the tips of their abdomens - Red-tailed Bombus lapidarius, Buff-tailed Bombus terrestris and White-tailed Bombus lucorum. The other three are the Common Carder Bombus pascuorum, the Garden bumblebee Bombus hortorum and the Early Bombus pratorum. But, each species comes in different sizes - queens, males and workers - and, just to complicate matters even further, the Buff-tailed and White-tailed workers all have white tails.
I haven't seen a Red-tailed yet and I don't know whether I have seen an Early, as they have the most colour variation. The Carders are easy to identify. They are small and ginger. There is a photo of one in my post dated 7th June. And the bee on the grass in the 19th May post looks rather like a White-tailed queen. I managed to get a few photos of a Buff-tailed queen this morning. She was on the path behind the house in the shade and looked rather groggy so I moved her up into the sun on the wall. Here are rear and front views.
This little bee could be a Garden worker. It has a long head, a distinguishing feature of the species, and pollen sacs.
On my way back to the house after a frustrating session of bumblebee photography, I noticed a small insignificant fly on some pink spiraea blossom (Little princess I think - an original inhabitant) and took a quick snap. A happy impulse because it looks quite amazing when it is magnified.
We may have seen a young blackbird in the front garden this morning. They are brown like their mothers but with a speckled breast. It was too far away to be certain but its body language indicated that it was a young one. The young siskins are also hard to differentiate from the females. They are said to have a streakier breast. This is a female . . .
. . . and this may or may not be a juvenile. It could be because it is very unusual to see adult siskins feeding on the ground.
A couple of easy to distinguish male siskins sharing the sunflower seed feeder.
No butterflies yet, apart from the few whites which have been around for weeks now. But we did have an unusual visitor on Tuesday evening - a hummingbird hawk moth. It wasn't easy to photograph because the light was bad and I didn't want to get too close and frighten it way - so I was using a slow shutter speed and a lot of zoom. It is fascinating watching them feed because they hover above a flower and then dart off to the next source of nectar. The larger photo is slightly clearer but the smaller one gives a better impression of the immense length of the moth's proboscis.
But it is still June and I mustn't ignore the flower of the month - the rose. It is only a week since the first buds showed colour on Gentle Hermione.
Now the petals are already falling off those first flowers and she is showing off her perfect fat pink blooms.
A totally different rose, which came up by itself from seed up near the summerhouse, is rosa glauca (a wild rose from central and southern Europe) with its delicate flowers and attractive blue/green foliage.
Our wild rose growing through the hawthorn is busy shedding petals on the lawn in front of my foxglove bed.
Most of the flowers are too high to photograph easily - but there was one perfect rose on a lower twig with some minute beetles feasting on the pollen.
More shrubs are coming into flower. This hypericum is another of the original inhabitants in the garden - probably H. Hidcote.
One of my favourites is the Deutzia. I came across this shrub for the first time when I was trimming the ivy on the wall and saw it in our neighbour's garden. She gave me a cutting but it didn't take. When I saw a plant for sale outside the flower shop in Ramsey I couldn't resist buying it. It turned out to be a slightly different type, which flowers later in the year, but is very pretty with its pink buds and frothy white flowers.
I don't have room in my garden for a proper wild flower meadow, so I make do with my sunny wild flower bank in the back garden where the meadowsweet is just starting to flower . . .
. . . and my woodland glade down on the bottom level near the road where the Welsh poppies and ragged robin flourish in the dappled shade amongst the shrubs.
One of the inhabitants of the glade, with unusual pale green flowers, is this "stinking hellebore", a native of the mountainous regions of Europe.
And finally, proof that the skies over the Island are not permanently grey . . . dazzling blue skies over Skyhill on Tuesday.
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