You learn something every day – well at least you do if you keep your eyes open.

This lovely warm sunny weather has brought out all the bumblebees and we’ve got our usual share buzzing around the garden. But this year I noticed one I’ve not registered before. Well I probably have seen it but not closely enough to wonder at what it is. It is an all black bumblebee-like bee and I’ve seen several in the last couple of days.

This morning one was silly enough to fly in through the study window and of course it then couldn’t find its way out. I rescued it in a clear perspex bug-catching pot I keep, so I was able to have a good look at it before releasing it. I also tried to photograph it but it was so constantly on the move I could not get a decent shot.

This bee was about 1.5-2 cm long, bumblebee shaped, black and hairy but with distinctive ginger hairs on its back legs; no other colour at all. At first I thought the ginger patches were full pollen sacs but they were much too dark and on closer inspection turned out to be patches of gingery hairs.

Looking it up it turns out to be a female Hairy-Footed Flower Bee, Anthophora plumipes. This is an important early pollinator. This s good because we seem to have lost our colonies of Osmia rufa (the Red Mason Bee) in the last couple of years. And it’s even better because our apple tree is in full bloom now so if we have good weather for the next few days we may get a decent apple crop this year. These bees are one of the very earliest to emerge from hibernation, with the males appearing as early as February and the females in March; they’re on the wing only until late-May. They’re quite common in the southern half of the UK, roughly south of a line from Birmingham to The Wash.

There’s a bit more information here for those who are interested.

Image from BWARS.