Andrena pruni

The first bees of the season are Andrena pruni, nesting in a huge suburban aggregation, under hedges, in garden soil, a little on the silty loam side, but nothing spectuacularly sandy, and certainly not mud banks. there must have been two or three hundred males, digging around for females to root out of the ground, to which they would apply their furious male copulatory energies. Live fast, little bees.