beeflies and peacock butterfly

Not a lot to report recently, partly due to the bad weather and also that I have not been walking my daughter to school so often the last couple of weeks. The tadploes have continued to develop. Apart from the tadpoles in the pond, I have removed a few to the water butt and a few to my workshop. I usually try to raise a few outside of the pond and then return thme when they each froglet stage to make sure at least a few make it to frog.

Yesterday I saw the great spotted woodpecker for the first time in a while. It was at the top of a high tree in Easthill Park (portslade). There was also a fair amount of bird song, notably blackbird, great tit and hedge sparrow at present.

Today it was still quite mild and I decided to take my laptop and work outside. I moved the garden chair (leaning aaginst the wall) so I could set the table up and noticed a bee fly in a spiders web. The picture below shows the bee fly in the web, upside down. the long probosis is visible in the flies shadow.

Bee flies are usually around in the spring. The female scatters her eggs with a flicking motion, I observed this last year on our rockery. The larvae hatch and go insearch of miner bee nests.

There was also a insect, resembling the brown coloured (golden) bee fly visiting the flowers by the pond. I think it might be a bee of some sort.

The first peackock butterfly in our garden. Peackock butterflies hibernate as adults during the winter and awake in the spring.