I spent a gorgeous morning last weekend at the National Trust's Nymans Gardens near Crawley. The sky was clear, the sun actually had heat in it, and the bees were busy.
One of the plants they were making a bee-line for were the crocuses - or at least they did once the flowers themselves has woken up. The thing with crocuses is that they do like to be in full sun, and only then can they be coaxed into opening right up and tempting the bees in.
The crocuses were growing in grass and were a whole array of lilacs, purples and yellows, which usually means that they are the Dutch Crocus (Crocus vernus), although some may have been the other common purple crocus for naturalising in grass, Crocus tomassinianus.
Once they had found them, the bees were rummaging with what to me looked like real excitement, crawling around deep in the cup of the flower, bottoms up, and coming out dotted with pollen.
Nymans also has some of the rarer crocuses, including this one, Crocus angustifolius from Russia, a gorgeous, widely-splayed sunshine-yellow crocus best grown in a sunny border
Once again, you can see that they are great for bees, and look how full its pollen basket is on its hind leg.
So if you do have crocuses in your garden, or pass by a patch of them in a local park or verge on a sunny day, just have a look to see if there are any stripy bottoms having a whale of a time.
Sure enough there was a bumble bee in one of my crocuses this afternoon, absolutely smothered in pollen and in no hurry to fly away...maybe it was afternoon nap time!