Spring at Last!

Chris Bentley
, 13 April 2016
Spring at Last!
Image: Fritz Geller-Grimm

With the arrival of spring weather at Rye Harbour I have been out and about looking for a couple of rare bee species, and yesterday I managed to find one! This is the early colletes (Colletes cunicularius) an RDB3 solitary bee that until recently was restricted to big sand dunes in north-western England and north and south Wales. In the last few years however it has been turning up in south-eastern England and last year we found one in late April at Castle Water, the first Sussex record. Yesterday I managed to find a couple of females in the same sandy area and I suspect that many of the bees I saw here were this species, though they were very adept at avoiding my clumsy sweeps with the net (I fear middle-age is slowing me down a bit!).

Also on the wing yesterday were both common bee-fly and the rarer dotted bee-fly (above). Common bee-fly as the name suggests, is found widely in Britain, while it's dotted cousin is largely restricted to south-east England. The sparse grassland at the northern end of Castle Water is a sea of ground-ivy at the moment, and these two species were taking advantage of the opportunities for some early season nectar. Both species are nest parasites on solitary bees, the fly larva devouring the bee grub after it has fattened itself up on the food the adult stored for it!.

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