Bees In The Garden

It's spring and our garden is full of flower and of course full of bees. I'm quite fascinated by bees and love watching them going about their business collecting pollen. I particularly love watching bumblebees and am always amazed how their apparantly random flight patterns somehow seem to get them where they need to go.

I've also been paying a lot of attention in our garden to the tiny little New Zealand native bees. We have over twenty species of small native solitary bees of which little is really known. We see three or four of these species in our garden. The one I see the most of is a lasioglossum bee. This is a tiny little balck bee about 6mm long. It collects pollen by packing it onto its abdomen and legs. You sometime see thjem absolutely caked in pollen. I often see them feeding inthe puha flowers so I let these flower regualry in our garden (they also draw the goldfinch in who love feeding on the seeds.

This week it was the vibernum that drew there attention with quite a large number busy in the newly opened flowers.