Over the Christmas period it seems to me that we have had almost every sort of weather imaginable.

There were days of torrential rain, snow, and bitter frosts, gales and bright sunny days where at a push you might have possibly got away with wearing a tee-shirt. All this in a week! Quite spectacular.

Wildlife wise, my favourite sighting was on January 3 when, buzzing into my garden, came a beautiful bumblebee.

From the time of year and the sheer size (I guess the body length must have been three centimetres with a diameter of two centimetres), this animal was a mated queen bumblebee.

I imagine she would have been enticed out by some of the warmer weather we experienced to look for a place to establish a new bumblebee colony for 2005.

January is a little early for this and I hope the bee managed to find a suitable refuge from the subsequent rather windy weather that followed.

I particularly like bumblebees as, like wasps, they are also armed with a barbless sting that allows them to sting repeatedly.

However, the really mellow character of this animal means that, unlike the rather belligerent wasp, incidents of bumblebee stings are few and far between.

Another little-known fact is that bumblebees establish colonies like honeybees and common wasps, yet you hardly ever see these as they are formed well underground in disused rodent holes.

The queen I'd spotted was probably searching for a suitable site to raise a new colony, trying to jump ahead of the competition as there can be only so much prime bumblebee real estate out there.

By trying to jump the queue, though, it was running a few risks. Firstly, as proved to be the case, the good weather is often short-lived and the blustery conditions that followed would be a real hazard.

Secondly, flying around and creating a new hive takes energy and, while the hibernating queen would have quite a reserve of stored fats as energy, it would be imperative that it found a nectar source without too much delay. At this time of year this would be a real challenge. One of the best sources of large quantities of nectar early in the year is the goat willow. This tree grows out on many of the nature reserves but elsewhere it seems to be getting scarcer and scarcer.

This is possibly due to the fact that it is not a particularly attractive tree and it has a rather spreading nature. It also spreads its seeds in a mass of cotton like tufts, which makes it less than popular as a garden plant. This is a shame as these trees are a real lifeline for bumblebees and other early emerging insects.