Small and perfectly formed

The shrill carder bee

It was my brother’s birthday recently, and as he doesn’t drive, I took him on a trip to a place that would normally be hard for him to get to. RSPB Newport Wetlands sits, as its name suggests, on the South coast of Wales near Newport. It’s an extensive area of… well, wetlands, those places of reedbed and marsh that we dismiss as useless only if we don’t understand their importance. Trips to wetlands, especially on very windy days with

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keep an eye out for Britain’s newest bee this Autumn

female ivy mining bee arrives with pollen

In the autumn of 2001, a small discovery was made in Dorset. It was a very small discovery in fact – only around a centimetre long.  It was the first sighting of a new bee species, the Ivy mining bee, in Britain. In fact, the Ivy mining bee is so easily overlooked that it was only discovered as a species just over 30 years ago in 1993. So when a friend of mine offered to show me some in Wiltshire,

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