View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - THE BIRDS AND.....

THE BIRDS AND….

Come on, surely you’ve worked out what this week’s blog is about just from that three word title? I usually write about birds in these articles, mainly because that’s what most people come to see at RSPB Old Moor, but the site is a Nature Reserve, not just a bird reserve so we try to give homes to as many different natural species as possible, not just the birds. I’ve occasionally written blogs about dragon- and damselflies, and I’ve done the odd piece about orchids and other plants but my ignorance of insects has so far stopped me from writing about them. I really should address this as there’s one particular kind of insect without which our planet (and our diet) would be drastically different.

All of us, whatever we eat, need bees. Almost 90% of wild plants and 75% of crops eaten by people and their grazing foodstock animals depend on insect pollination and bees are, without doubt, Earth’s greatest plant pollinators. One out of every three mouthfuls of our food depends on pollinators such as bees. If nothing else, we should look after them because they’re the single greatest pollinator of the coffee plant. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to live in a world without my daily caffeine kick-start. Bees make that possible. 

And they produce honey too. That’s what bees do isn’t it; they live in communal hives where they make lots of lovely honey, right?

You should know by now that whenever I end a paragraph with “right?” then the next line is almost always going to start with, “Wrong”, and this one is no exception. So…

Wrong! Almost all bee species that we see in Britain are solitary animals. Of the 270 different kinds of British bees, approximately 220 of them live on their own or with a single partner. I have to admit to being pretty ignorant when it comes to this most crucial group of insects so I did a chunk of research and produced Volunteer Shaun’s Handy-Dandy Quick Guide to Bees You Might See at Old Moor and the Other Dearne Valley RSPB Sites. I think you’ll agree that the title I actually chose for this blog was a little snappier. Let’s start with the colony dwellers, which come in two main groups.

HONEY BEES

These are the slim, hard-working bees that live in square white hives lorded over by interfering humans in HazMat suits. Almost all of our Honey Bees are now of the domesticated variety, even the ones that have ‘gone feral’ and formed a wild hive away from a man-made one. For example, we have some nest boxes on our office walls at Old Moor, away from the public areas. We expected Blue Tits or House Sparrows to occupy them but a couple of years ago a swarm of Honey Bees surrounded the entrance of one. I saw this huge, football-sized mass gathered around the box, presumably waiting while their Queen approved their new home. And there have been bees in the box ever since. As long as they make a good supply of honey, they could stay there indefinitely.

BUMBLEBEES

Bumblebees also live in large groups. We have 24 different kinds of Bumblebee in the UK and some of them are our easiest to identify. Bumblebees are the big, fluffy ones that drone around lazily on hot summer days. You can see several different species at Old Moor and a few are pretty easy to distinguish. For starters there are Red-Tailed, Buff-Tailed and White-Tailed Bumblebees. They look exactly as their names suggest and their slow flight makes them easy to see and identify. 

Garden Bumblebees are common and scruffy-looking. Look for black bands interspersed with yellow ones that get paler from head towards the tail.

Tree Bees are another one that should be easy to spot and identify. They have a fuzzy ginger back, black abdomen, white tail.  

Common Carder Bees are simple to recognise as well. They’re the only UK bees that are all brown without a white tail.

So the bees that form colonies are the ones that you’re most likely to give a name to but we most definitely can’t ignore the Solitary Bees. They make up over 90% of our bee species yet they’re often ignored or misidentified. And probably the most surprising thing I learned about the Solitary Bee group is that the vast majority of them have no stinger at all, and even the few that do are very reluctant to use it. That puts them head and shoulders ahead of wasps in my book.

There are many of them but, to be honest, these are beyond my current identification skills. Perhaps I could produce a follow up, more in depth Handy Dandy Guide if and when I learn more gooder?

I do however know one thing about these solitary creatures; They like to make their homes in holes. Some they create for themselves, others will use a pre-existing cavity. Last year we created a Minibeast Garden at Old Moor, behind the Visitor’s Centre. Of course that included providing lots of bamboo and reed tubes (‘bug hotels’) for insects such as bees to make nests in but we also created a bee bank. That’s an area of bare earth that is perfect for miner bees to burrow into. Far more bee species prefer this to the tubular options that people put up so if you have the room and the inclination, get digging! 

I hope you'll agree that without bees the world would be a lot less habitable place. Please look after our bees. They’ve been looking after us for thousands of years.