Phil Hendry took this lovely photo of a cuckoo bee on the margin of the Long Pads – one of very many. There were lots of mining bees too. This is what he wrote:
Following your questions about whether it is a ‘good’ bee… It doesn’t collect pollen; it visits a wide variety of flowers. It’s ‘naughty’ in that it is a ‘cleptoparasite’ – laying its eggs in the nests of several species of solitary ‘Andrena’ mining bees – along that path, they’re mostly Andrena fulva, the Tawny mining bee, though there are a few Ashy mining bees (Andrena Cineraria) nesting there too.
