Visiting Edinburgh's Parks with my parents for 30 Days Wild

My parents are visiting this weekend and for 30 Days Wild we've been visiting a few of Edinburgh's parks together.

Yesterday we visited Braidburn Valley Park

and Princes Street Gardens

Today we visited Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, where many of the rhododendrons and azaleas are still in full bloom and looking stunning in the bright sunshine

The main pond is also looking great after its recent draining and refurbishment

We admired the display of alpines and other plants in the newly redeveloped alpine garden

In this area too, we were able to do one of the activities specifically listed in the 30 Days website, which is to follow a bee. I had seen a very small bee in the flowers, which Crafty Green Boyfriend told me was a solitary bee of some sort (there are about 200 species of solitary bees in the UK). I then found some of the holes where the bees live(you can see two in this photo, one in the soil just to the right of the cross shape and one further to the right of that)

Crafty Green Boyfriend then used his patience and the extra zoom on his camera to capture one of the bees entering one of the holes, covered in pollen that it will feed to its young (you nay need to click on the photo to enlarge it, the bee is just burrowing into a hole near the green leaves just below the centre of the photo)