Blue Mason Bees

While I do still have fuzzy animal pictures waiting to be painted, my day was slightly derailed when I came home from work last night. My girlfriend had told me she was ordering mason bees, to keep in the yard as pollinators for our garden. Somehow I didn't anticipate how enthusiastic she'd be when they arrived. The mason bee house is bigger than either of us expected, while the bees themselves are tiny, almost fly-like. With camera poised I watched while she opened the boxes that held their cocoons, to find them already emerging. At first they were sluggish, wobbly, but in less than a minute a few were scaling the sides of the little humidity box that came with them. We let them climb on our hands briefly just to maneuver them back into the box, but by two or three minutes they were looking seriously ready to explore.
As I write this, they're in a special box in the fridge, waiting for us to get the bee house set up after work tonight.
Yes, we did warn the roommates.
My sketches are from google image search, but these are the same type of blue spring mason bees, just in better detail than I could ever manage to see from real life. Unfortunately the lighting was bad so late in the evening and my own photos aren't so good.
My girlfriend, meanwhile, murmurs 'bees!' and giggles every now and then. It's a cheerful thought on a grey and rainy Friday. This weekend there will be gardening, and bees.