absolutelynotnormal

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“The greatest tragedies were written by the Greeks and Shakespeare…neither knew chocolate.”

– Sandra Boynton

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Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up. I went out for a walk on Easter weekend and found (for the very first time*) Chocolate Mining Bees (Andrena scotica). Sadly, these teeny, tiny, busy little bees do not come wrapped in gold foil with a bell round their necks. They do, however, come with a substantial amount of entertainment. I do have some slight issues with the name, though. They don’t really look like chocolate. Or remind me of chocolate in any way.

*First time knowingly … I’m sure I’ve walked past them thinking ‘Oh look, bees’ a million times. But before my latest obsession, I didn’t even know that chocolate bees were a thing.

But anyway. I had decided to go for a relatively quick wander up the track to St Mary’s Church in Pickenham and then circle back across the bottom end of Houghton Common, down the green lane and back along the road to the car. It’s not somewhere I’d found until last year, when I encountered the Woundwort Shieldbug there (see below), but it’s one that’s been added to my repertoire now.

Burnished copper shields

When I parked the car and got out, it took me a couple of moments to realise that I was standing in the middle of a bee colony … mostly because, as soon as these tiny bees sense any kind of threat, they scarper! Never has the word ‘flighty’ been more apropos. But there they were; tiny little holes scattered all around this area of almost bare, sandy soil. I sat patiently (we all know it’s not my strong point) on the floor for about twenty minutes, trying to lull them into a sufficient sense of security that they would return, but even when they did, they were not fans of the camera, zooming off as soon as they sniffed even a shred of my focus being turned in their direction.

I gave up and headed up the track past generous banks of pale yellow cowslips, their dainty heads nodding in the breeze.

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By the time I got to the end of my wander, the bright sunshine had worked its (dark) magic, and I had a relatively well established migraine. It can be a bit of a challenge to take photos when half your field of vision is obscured by a purple and green dazzle, but not as much as driving would be. So when I got back to the car, I knew I needed to take the magic pink pills* and wait for them to work before I could go anywhere.

*Yes, I’m aware that I could have made this whole thing so much easier if I’d remembered to pick them up and put them in my pocket when I left the car, but I’m an idiot and forgot! 🤦‍♀️

So what better way to spend my enforced downtime than watching the bees?

I sat down and, obviously, the bees scattered. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. Eventually, they started coming back and working their way closer and closer to the holes nearest me. I still couldn’t get near them with my camera, though. Until, finally, one bee arrived, who was far more focused on her burrow than she was on the idiot human sitting around on the floor. She dived into a shallow burrow and started digging for all she was worth. I’d never really thought about how difficult it must be to dig when you have no tools and no opposable thumbs. You can absolutely see why these insects prefer sandy soils; it would be a nightmare to do this in mud or clay. She seemed to excavate the particles of soil by wiggling around and using the underside of her abdomen and her hind legs to shove everything backwards. And all of this while her head was buried in loose particles of sand. I watched her until she wiggled backwards out of the burrow in a very ungainly manner. She seemed to almost shiver, shaking the fine dust off her body and buzzing off.

Migraine finally resolved, I buzzed off, too.

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