Unsprung photo - mason bee

Last night was rather exciting for me as BBC Springwatch Unsprung shared my mite infested mason bee as the bug of the day photo,
here is the screenshot of my bee's big moment!
Nature isn't always pretty
If you want to hear what Nick baker had to say about it you can find it on bbc i-player for three weeks

I photographed this bee on Monday morning slowly crawling over our outside table it could hardly move as it was so weighed down by the phoretic mites, I made up a sugar and water solution and put some drops of it on the table for it to feed from, which it did, then I popped indoors for something and when I returned it had gone
But I did manage to take these pictures before it went

thunderstorm approaching

parading mallards

Attention!

Quick March!

About turn!

Quick March!

At Ease!

Fall Out!

I've always said I wanted ducks in our garden, I never expected them to come in the form of two male mallards though!  - another first for our garden -stayed for around an hour on Saturday evening they would have stayed longer if our dog hadn't realised they were there!

Brimstone

This beautiful brimstone visited our garden today, I had to break off conversation with daughter to rush inside to find my camera, shouting 'stay' 'stay' 'stay' as if it understands dog commands!!!
Any way it stayed and floated from one flower to the next for two or three minutes, long enough for me to get some photos -we haven't had one in our garden since August 2010 so you can imagine my excitement!!!!

Lime Hawk-moth

We have put our trap out a few times this year with mixed results, last night came up trumps though - with this beauty resting on top. Our first ever Lime Hawk-moth

Wood Mouse

We had a visitor to our back yard earlier on this evening, cleaning up some of the dropped sunflowers, this cute Wood Mouse. I photographed it through our dining room window, but it spied me and froze just staring - eyes bulging, not even twitching, so I quickly took this photo and moved away from the window as I didn't want anything swooping down and taking it or worse still for one of our neighbours cats to get it, I went into kitchen and watched from there he was still staring at the dining room window, but then darted back under one of our old sinks - safe!