7 may 2008In the crumbly silt undercliff at Lulworth Cove, just to the north of the caff and the well-spoken artist painting Flecker poems on pebbles in script too small for me to read, there's a sizable colony of Osmia rufa, the red mason bee. They seem to be doing more-or-less fine, although some of them are landing randomly and casting about for their holes and not finding them and going away again. Maybe this is a defence mechanism against the attentions of a rather standard-looking dipteran fly (but oh, how sinister its body language). Among them, there's another mason or miner bee I can't identify (answers welcome) - larger, slimmer and dark blue-black, less cuddly and more on the ball. A torpedo among teddy bears.
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