Beautiful colourful bee-eater by Brenda

This beautiful colourful bee-eater in front of the lens.

The bird is 28 cm long (including extended tail feathers 30.5 cm) and weighs 44 to 78 g.[3] It is recognisable by its exotic colours, blue-green tail, yellow throat and dark eye stripe. The plumage is similar in both sexes.

Bee-eaters are insectivores and agile flyers, which also manage to graze insects in flight. The name clearly comes from its main food source. The presence of large insect prey such as grasshoppers, dragonflies, wasps and also bees is a prerequisite for bee-eaters. The bee-eater is immune to bee and wasp stings. To avoid stings, it manages to rid them of their stings by rubbing them against a branch. It lives in groups and therefore breeds in colonies in burrows in walls of banks and mountains, sometimes also in the ground.

The bee-eater breeds in south-western Europe, eastern Europe and central Europe, Asia Minor, central and western Asia and north-western Africa. The largest numbers in Europe are found in Portugal, Spain and Bulgaria. There is also a breeding population in southwestern South Africa that is a resident bird there. Bee-eaters winter in Africa. Breeding birds from the Iberian Peninsula, France and north-west Africa winter in West Africa, north of the equator. Birds that breed much further east migrate 's winter via Cyprus or through the Arabian Peninsula to southern parts of Africa.[3][1]

The habitat in Europe consists of semi-open agricultural landscape, wide river valleys, grazed area with trees here and there. Conditions for nesting are the presence of steep walls on water - rivers, ponds and lakes - where they excavate a nest tunnel in a steep wall. In wintering areas, the bird is found in savannah habitat.