Bee identification available from EcoWarwicker

As Spring begins to wake up the insect world you may notice some large queen bees bumbling around looking to set up home. Charmingly, bumble bees used to be known as humble bees. Darwin beautifully illustrated the unpredictable and complex interactions between species, his 'entangled bank', with an anecdote involving humble bees. In this example he linked the occurence of cats around villages with the proliferation of heartsease and red clover - not an immediately obvious direct connection. However, the cats preyed upon small rodents, which themselves preyed upon humble bees. When the rodent population was reduced, the humble bees fluorished and pollination of the heartsease and red clover was high.

There are in fact in excess of 270 species of bee in the United Kingdom, around 240 of those are solitary bees, like the mason bee or the mining bee. There is a bee for almost every job - there are plasterer bees, scissor bees, carpenter bees, wool carder bees and even mourning bees. There are bees of almost every description - shaggy bees, yellow bees, short faced bees, variegated cuckoo bees and even pantaloon bees.

Osmia cornifrons, a mason bee pokes its head out of its handiwork.

As Darwin so eloquently pointed out, bees are important. Following the success of introducing moth testing last year, and discussions we have had with our colleagues, this year we are expanding into bees. We think this will be of interest to many nature lovers, but also folk working in agronomy and ecologists generally, The sampling is similar as for the moth test (see website for details).