With a blog title like that, I'm sure you'll think I've been sampling toadstools in the garden again.
But, no, I've genuinely found a four-winged garden cuckoo, and I have the photos to prove it.
The scene of my discovery was once more the Bishop's Garden in Chichester, where again the patches of Red Dead-nettle were the only real attractions as far as nectar was concerned.
Common Carder Bees were guzzling merrily, and male Hairy-footed Flower Bees were whizzing backwards and forwards manically from flower patch to flower patch, as they are wont to do.
But then I noticed a rather more sedate black bee dipping its head deep into the Dead-nettle flowers. It looked quite dramatic, about the size of a small bumblebee, but with a very pointed rear end (left), and on close inspection a couple of pale dots on either side of its abdomen (you can just make them out in the photo), and white knees (easiest to see in the right hand photo ). It was quite a savage yet dramatic looking thing.
And then there was another. The red head? I think that was pollen.
Now insects can be tricky little blighters to identify, but this one turned out with a bit of research to be fairly recognisable. It turns out that they were females of a species called Melecta albifrons, so I'm going to call them Mel for short.
It is a cuckoo bee, a species that lays its eggs inside the nest of another bee. Its larvae then munch the food supply that has been collected by the adults of the other bee - yes, an act of stealing you might say, but of course we will be careful not to tarnish the species with the human emotions one would associate with that word. This is after all just nature doing what nature has designed it to do.
The 'host' that unwittingly provides the food for the cuckoo is our old friend, the Hairy-footed Flower Bee, one of which came whizzing through my garden this week, pausing at Erysimum 'Bowles Mauve'.
See, it all happens in gardens! You don't have to go far to find little dramas playing themselves out, and four-winged cuckoos called Mel.
Adrian what a wonderful blog post! Beautiful photographs too! You have certainly taught me a lot about bees. A cuckoo bee I have never heard of before, I have seen black bees in my garden and wondered what they were and I will now look for the pale dots. Talking of cuckoos, I have heard them here on the North Kent Marshes both at Northward Hill and Cliffe Pools and lots of nightingales too! Spring has well and truly sprung!