Dapper

This morning I looked at the long front border I sorted out last month and realised that it was being reclaimed by pernicious weeds, and I was going to have to do something about it. So bang went my planned day out. It took two hours of back-torturing work with a variety of sharp implements, but eventually I restored some kind of order. But then I found that I couldn't bear the thought of all that work being just a reprise, and not moving us any further forward. And I thought of the long-standing top line of the Beastly Garden List - Edge and tidy front side border - and I looked at the front side border (what I could see of it underneath grass, nettles, bramble and %£{*@! wood avens), and I sighed, then swore, then went and fetched a spade. 

By the time R arrived home from a relaxing morning in Stratford I was exhausted and seething, but the side border was edged, and the large wheelbarrow was too full of grass and weeds for me to be able to move it. The bed still looked awful, but now we could at least see where it was supposed to be, R volunteered to set to work at once, clearing it out. Luckily for him though, I'd discovered already that the ground was so dry on that side of the garden it had set like concrete around the roots of the grass and weeds, so I recommended that he wait until tomorrow, and said I'd use the sprinkler this evening and give the whole border a good soaking. I'm not sure how he managed to contain his disappointment at the delay.

I was too hot and cross to do much in the way of bug-bothering while I was gardening, and too tired afterwards, but a few insects did manage to attract my attention, and of those this female Orange-tailed Mining Bee (Andrena haemorrhoa) was my favourite. Males of this species are more attractive than most male miners, being relatively robust and hairy, with a combination of buff and tawny pile, and a little tawny tuft at the end of the abdomen. The females though are strikingly handsome, and very distinctive - the combination of a thorax that's red above and grey below, a grey face, an abdomen that's almost hairless apart from the orange tip, and yellowish middle and rear legs with an extravagant white pollen brush, really couldn't belong to any other type of bee. Even when they're becoming a little worn (like this one, who's done enough burrowing to have scraped a bare patch on her thorax) they still always manage to look smart, and even when they're almost bald they're still identifiable, if only because the orange tail seems to be the last hair to disappear.

Steven Falk says: "Nesting occurs in dispersed aggregations in light soils, especially south-facing slopes and banks." To which my instant response is: light soils? Round here? They'll be lucky. I hope the fact that this female appeared next to me on the mahonia while I was cutting a new lawn edge doesn't mean that I interfered with her nest, but given the energy it was costing me to break that earth with a metal spade, I think it was almost certainly just a coincidence. I'm pretty sure there are bees mining the ground underneath our laurel hedge, and I can think of a few other sections of the garden that might be soft enough for them to work, but if they have designs on this side border they'll need to equip themselves with tiny Kangos.