BWARS - Bees, Wasps & Ants Recording Society: Recent Episodes
None
East Suffolk - Hylaeus communis male & female. by Alan Cornish.jpg
East Suffolk - Hylaeus communis by Alan Cornish.jpg
Temnothorax unifasciatus on Gueurnsey by Andy Marquis.jpg
Short-haired Bumblebees: Challenges & Lessons - online
Social Wasps of the UK entoLEARN Webinar Display Date Thu 12 Jun 2025 Sort Date Thu, 06/12/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxTue, 02/11/2025 - 20:23
Improving Bee Hotel Design: The Big Bee Hotel Experiment Display Date Tuesday, April 22 Sort Date Tue, 04/22/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxWed, 01/22/2025 - 16:47
The Mind of a Bee: An Exploration of the Intelligence of Bees Display Date Tuesday, February 18 Sort Date Tue, 02/18/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxWed, 01/22/2025 - 16:40
Bumblebees of the UK Part 3 Display Date Monday, 10 February Sort Date Mon, 02/10/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxWed, 01/22/2025 - 16:27
LNHS Field Day at Wormwood Scrubs SINC and LNRs Display Date Tuesday 13 May 2025 Sort Date Tue, 05/13/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxWed, 01/22/2025 - 16:23
LNHS Field Day at Hackney Marshes Display Date Thursday 10 July 2025 Sort Date Thu, 07/10/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxWed, 01/22/2025 - 16:22
LNHS Field day at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford. Display Date Saturday 29 March 2025 Sort Date Sat, 03/29/2025 - 12:00 Mike FoxWed, 01/22/2025 - 16:17
BWARS AGM 14th and 15th September 2024
sternites_of_T._pygmaeum_by_Matt_Hamer.jpg
Lateral_of_T._pygmaeum_by_Matt_Hamer.jpg
Head_of_T._pygmaeum_by_Matt_Hamer.jpg
dorsal_of_T._pygmaeum_by_Matt_Hamer.jpg
Tapinoma pygmaeum Authority (Dufour 1857) Mike FoxMon, 08/05/2024 - 15:21 Distribution So far only known from Royston in Herts where it is abundant in a private garden and has been seen in other gardens up to 200m away.
Also known from Spain, France, Switzerland and in a hothouse in Belgium
Habitat Only known from private gardens so far.
Identification Workers are ~2mm long and black. They can be keyed out using the key in Seifert's Tapinoma Revision 2024.
ReferencesSeifert, B., Kaufmann, B., Fraysse, L. 2024. A taxonomic revision of the Palaearctic species of the ant genus Tapinoma Mayr 1861 (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 5435(1), 1-74
Nesting biology Nests in the soil and under stones
Author of profile Mike Fox
Year profile last updated 2024
2015-06-21_01-14-57 M=B R=10 S=2 Mdi_0.jpg
2015-06-21_01-24-49 M=B R=10 S=2 Mdi.jpg
2015-06-21_00-14-05 M=B R=10 S=2 Mdi.jpg
A new key to Nomad bees by Steven Falk has been added to the identification guides page.Mike Fox
Andrena vaga male by Mike Ball.jpg
Andrena vaga female by Mike Ball.jpg
Else & Edwards Understandings Reference
A new draft key to the Pompilidae (spider-hunting wasps) by Graham Collins and also a link to the Pompilidae section of Steven Falk's Flickr site are on the Identification guides page.Mike Fox
Andrena russula Authority iso. Praz et al: 2022 Synonyms Andrena similis Smith,1849, Andrena croceiventris Morawitz, 1871, Andrena rufo-hispida Dours, 1872, Andrena stefanii Pérez, 1895, Andrena ocreata cyprisina Warncke, 1975, Andrena (Taeniandrena) similis caraimica Osytshnjuk, 1994
Mike FoxThu, 01/18/2024 - 16:09 Distribution The distribution extends from southern England north to Yorkshire and in Wales and again in northern Scotland. However, there are apparently no records from much of northern England and southern Scotland. Note the concentration of records in the vicinity of the Cromarty and Dornoch Firths. The species is not known from Ireland or the Channel Islands.
The species is widely distributed in the western Palaearctic, from southern Sweden and Finland south to northern Morocco, Algeria and Libya, east to Kazakhstan, the Middle East (Gusenleitner & Schwarz, 2002) and Afghanistan (Dylewska, 1987). The nominate form occurs throughout its European range, with the exception of southern Italy and Sicily, where it is replaced by A. similis croceiventris Morawitz.
Status (in Britain only) Falk (1991) lists this species as Notable B (now known as Nationally Scarce Nb).
Habitat Throughout much of southern Britain this is a rare and very local bee but occurs in various habitats, including chalk grassland, moorland and rough coastal landslips. M Macdonald (pers. comm.) describes the bee as being quite common along forest rides in northern Scotland.
Flight period Univoltine; late April to the end of June.
Pollen collected Apparently oligolectic on Fabaceae (Westrich, 1989). In Britain, a female has been observed collecting pollen from a gorse flower.
Nesting biology Perkins (1919) reports the species as sometimes nesting in large, compact aggregations. Dylewska (1987) states that in mainland Europe the species nests singly.
Flowers visited Willow (sallow), aubretia, bilberry, pear, hawthorn, common bird’s-foot-trefoil, gorse, clover, sycamore, bogbean, ground-ivy and speedwell.
Parasites No Nomada has been associated with this mining bee. Specimens are very rarely stylopised, apparently by Stylops alfkeni (Perkins, 1919, 1943; Kinzelbach, 1971).
Author of profile G R Else
Year profile last updated 2012 - name changed 2024
Bibliography The bibliography that was on the BWARS site up to June 2023 has sadly been lost. Fortunately an archived copy exists and can be accessed from the following link.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230607053003/https://www.bwars.com/biblio
Mike FoxMon, 12/11/2023 - 19:44
Lasius flavus showing colour difference between queen and workers and polymorphism of workers by Dylan Hodgkiss.jpg
philoctetes-truncatus-1jd.jpg
Image andrena-barbilabris_1no.jpg
BWARS AGM and Members’ Day Sunday 18th September 2022 9:00 – 15:30 Meeting to be held via Zoom hosted by Tanyptera Trust
The event is free to members, but you are asked to register in advance by email to the Membership Secretary, Clare Boyes (address on BWARS website Contacts page, or in BWARS Newsletter) by Weds 14th Sept. An email with link will be sent to attendees a few days prior to the event.
AGM Agenda 9:00 – 10:45 1. Welcome
The Committee gives notice of a proposed change to the BWARS Constitution (also notified in Spring 2022 Newsletter). This will be put to members at the AGM on 18th September 2022. Any comments by email or letter must reach the Chair, Louise Hislop, by 1st September to be considered. A copy of the full Constitution is available to members on application to the Secretary, Clare Boyes.
Section 7, Conduct of an AGM and Elections, an additional clause to be added to define quoracy at an AGM:
You can find and download a zip file of all BWARS records at 10km resolution here. It has just been updated.
BWARS AGM and Members’ Day took place on Sunday 24th October 2021 from 10:00 am
Meeting was held over Zoom
AGM Agenda There will be the opportunity to ask short questions via the Chat function on Zoom.
Voting will take place ‘en bloc’ at the end of each section, via Zoom poll. The poll question will read: ‘On the motion before us, do you agree?’ and the options will be ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘abstain’.
Flying Ant Days - please enter your observations here Enter data page
Scientists from the University of Leeds are looking for assistence in collecting data on where and when "flying ant days occur". Please help by completing an online form at the link above. You can read more about this BioDAR Project to the right.
What is the difference between an insect and a raindrop?
Weather radars are constantly collecting information about rain, but in doing so a lot of other data is collected too - including data relating to insects. Evidence concerning worldwide insect declines is growing, and weather radar data represents a new way of monitoring what insects are doing over large spatial scales. This is what we at the BioDAR project are interested in - creating an openly accessible “weather map” of aerial insect activity across the UK.
The BioDAR Project was conceived by a group of biologists and radar scientists at the University of Leeds. The project was designed to use a mixture of machine learning, field observations, and 3D modelling to determine the extent of the ecological information that can be extracted from weather radar data. Like many of us, the pandemic disrupted our lives and workflow; it put our fieldwork and in-situ data collection on hold and we had to think of different ways to help validate some of our research questions, so we turned to mass swarming events and citizen science.
Each year in the UK we witness “flying ant day” - several days across each summer where males and new queens from species like the black garden ant (Lasius niger) take to the air to mate and disperse in search of new nesting sites. We are using these swarming events to see if this massive increase in insect activity can be detected by our weather radar.
But to do this we need your help!
We have created a quick and easy web survey that you can fill in to help us track flying ant swarms across the UK. So if you see flying ants this year, please report your sightings - we’d really appreciate it! The survey be found here: https://forms.gle/P3Tof3os6idBCYMA6, or by scanning the QR code below, and takes less than a minute to fill in.
If we are able to reliably detect flying ant swarm activity using weather radars, this will allow us to explore in-depth the environmental conditions that trigger swarming; not only at ground level, but also at higher altitudes. It will also give us a peek into how spatially restricted (or not) their dispersal is, and whether this differs across different landscapes. And finally, it will enable us to map this phenomenon over time, and investigate how environmental change affects flying ant activity.
If you have any questions concerning BioDAR or our flying ant project, please contact Prof. Elizabeth Duncan at e.j.duncan@leeds.ac.uk or Tom Dally at t.m.dally@leeds.ac.uk
Species pages have been created for Polistes nimpha and Pemphredon fabricii. Both were added to the British list in 2021.
The second edition of the Bees, Wasp and Ants of Kent by Geoff Allen has been published by the Kent Field Club. Priced at £16 including postage and packing (£12 at Field Club events), it has 198 pages in full colour in A4 format, with notes on all species recorded in the county updated from the first edition (2009) plus distribution maps and photographs. Copies may be ordered at https://www.kentfieldclub.org.uk/publications/books.
David Baldock et al - The Vespiform Wasps of Portugal, is available to purchase (19 euros plus carriage) or downloaded from here: The Vespiform Wasps of Portugal