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Mornings are getting darker, days are getting colder and the trees are beginning to look a little barer. Autumn is truly upon us. The saddest thing for me about the end of summer, minus the fact that it’s the start of cold weather for the next four months or so, is the obvious lack of many bee species. Most notably the bumblebees. Most colonies have died out now, leaving only the hibernating queens to carry on the genes until next spring or summer when they can start a colony of their own. However, you will still notice a few bees out and about on a ‘warm’ autumnal day. Honeybees are still around, having colonies which survive all year on their stores of honey, but they’re common almost any time of year. No, it is currently peak time for the rather aptly named, Ivy bee, or Colletes hederae.
This rather lovely solitary bee (for explanation on solitary see some of my previous posts) is a recent immigrant to Britain, with the first individuals being spotted in 2001. Since then this bee has managed to spread itself throughout the south of the UK. Its success is largely due to the fact that its main food source is the incredibly common plant, ivy. Ivy is found EVERYWHERE, on trees, buildings walls, and when mature a large patch of ivy can have thousands of flowers. It’s a vital food resources for pollinators at autumn time as there aren’t many other floral resources around. It blooms between mid -August and will continue until late October. The ivy bees begin to emerge from their nests around late September until November, ensuring they overlap with the peak bloom of ivy. Clever bees.
Ivy bees have been given a lot of attention, not necessarily for a good reason. They are ground nesting bees, meaning the females will dig out a small hole in the ground to lay her eggs in, and like many other solitary bees will nest in aggregations. This is where you will get a large collection of individual females all digging out their nests near one another. This is smart, it helps to protect you from parasitism and predation. Besides, when there is some prime real estate in the area everyone wants a piece. What results, however, is huge numbers of bees all nesting in a relatively small area. This isn’t a problem when it’s in a field out of the way, but when the bees find a nice spot in someone’s garden, it can cause it bit of a panic… At the beginning of their flight season the males will emerge from the nests first. They then practice a behaviour called patrolling. They will fly around the entrance of all the nests waiting for emerging females and then pounce on them to mate. Who said romance is dead eh? So most of the time when activity is at its highest, with hundreds maybe thousands of bees flying around, they’re males. This is an important point because males can’t sting you. They are completely harmless.
Lots of pest control companies will get phone calls around this time from panicked individuals claiming there is a swarm of aggressive bees in their garden, fearing for their children’s safety. It’s kind of fair enough, at first glance it can be quite a scary sight, and the noise too can be quite intimidating. There isn’t really anything these companies can do. The bees nest in the ground, so unless you want them to dig up your entire garden and remove all the nests, co-existence is really the only option.
But do not fear! Science is here to show you that this option really isn’t too bad. I have been given the envious task of assessing the likelihood of getting stung when interacting with an ivy bee aggregation. Lucky me. Essentially what I am doing is carrying out various activities (standing, walking and fake ‘gardening’, less I look as ridiculous as you can imagine) and I count the number of times individuals bump into me as well as the number of times I get stung. I also get an idea of activity levels by sweeping the area with my insect net every 5 minutes and counting how many males and females I catch. Just to give you an idea of how many bees there are in this aggregation on average every time I sweep I catch about 50-60 bees. That’s only in a 3x3m area. I’ve done this about 9 times now, 20 minutes each time and so far I have been stung once, on my ankle. Considering how much I’m messing with these aggregations and how many bees there are, that’s good odds. I’m not going to lie, it did hurt, but only for about two minutes and then it stopped. There was very minimal swelling, about the same as a mosquito bite, and my foot didn’t fall off, so I would count that as a win.
Essentially what this rather sadistic experiment is showing is that don’t panic if you have an aggregation in your garden. They’re chilled out bees and you’re unlikely to get stung. If you are unlucky like me and do get stung, it isn’t that bad. I’m TERRIBLE with pain, so you can trust my assessment of pain.
Moral of this story, don’t let the bees scare you. They don’t want to sting you and if you’re not running around with a net like I was they probably won’t. They’re super cute bees, so I would recommend just going at and looking at them. If none of this had made you feel better, they’re only around for a couple of months so maybe just hunker down a little early for winter and wait it out.