Living up to its name, I found this Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) last Friday alternating between sitting on newly laid woodchip mulch and the adjacent stone wall, basking in the short-lived spring sunshine (we’re now back to grey rainy days). As the Bumblebee Conservation website reports, this bumble is ‘One of the “Big 7” widespread and abundant species, found in a wide range of habitats across the UK’, and is ‘a spring specialist’. If you’re not sure which bumblebee species you’ve seen, the Bumblebee Conservation website also has an excellent online guide that shows clear images of each species’ queens and workers, males and females, as appropriate.