Bees after the rain....

Its been a cool wet week but today,  just after lunch, it stopped raining and warmed up a little to around 16 degrees.  Within a very few minutes I noticed that the garden was filling up with early and tree bumblebees - no other species, just those two but plenty of them.

They were visiting flowers that, on a warm May day, would normally have run out of nectar by that time of day. But today, because of the rain, they were still fully loaded and apparently the bees were hungry.

This picture shows a male 'early' bumblebee hanging on a geranium phaeum which is a great shade plant and looks really wonderful in swathes under trees. (There seem to be a lot of males this year.) Normally this plant is very popular with carders but none in evidence today. We sell this geranium as part of our collection of bee-plants for light shade

Bombus pratorum on geranium phaeum