Bee here now

The ceanothus hedge out front has bloomed, and it is crawling with bees. I saw honeybees in two different places on Vancouver Island the past couple of weekends, but I still don't see any around here. The ceanothus is crawling with two different kinds of bumblebee. I saw some bumblebees at Mossybanks on Sunday that looked absolutely enormous in comparison. They looked two or three times as big as the larger of the two types that I see around our house. It's also curious that there are a bunch of ceanothus bushes along the Burke-Gilman trail that bloom before mine do and don't ever have any bees on them. The flower clusters are almost identical; maybe a little smaller. Are they different enough that they don't attract bees, or are there no bees in the vicinity? Hard to believe the latter is true, but then I have no idea where the bumblebees in our neighborhood live, unless it's in the dead trees in the park up the street.

Update: Closer inspection of the ceanothus this morning discovered a third variety of bee. It looked somewhat like a honeybee, but maybe a little larger and with slightly different coloring. I'm far from an expert on the matter, but perhaps this was the elusive mason bee that I keep hearing about.

I also spotted two more ceanothuses in bloom on 36th as I walked to work -- one of them with bees, the other without. I'm still curious why the difference.