Nick Owens' new book - The Bees of Norfolk will be published on 1 May 2017. More information can be downloaded here

Defra issued a press release on 20 September 2016 regarding a Gloucestershire record for Asian hornet Vespa velutina
See: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-hornet-identified-in-gloucestershire

BWARS' information sheet on this wasp can be found here

Researchers at Liverpool University are assessing the presence of Arsenophonus bacterial symbionts in UK solitary bees and require expert volunteers to collect and identify speciemens. Read more

A revised and updated checklist of the UK aculeate fauna has just been published covering all of the species of interest to BWARS. The checklist compiled after much painstaking work by George R. Else, Barry Bolton & Gavin R. Broad can be downloaded freely from the Biodiversity Data Journal at: https://bdj.pensoft.net/article/8050/instance/2650988/

BWARS member Paddy Saunders has produced a new atlas of bumblebees Bumblebees of Cornwall and Scilly. It is available as a printed book or as free pdf from the Environmental Records Centre for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly here.

BWARS member Steven Falk's much anticipated Field Guide to Bees of Great Britain and Ireland has been published.  This is the first extensive guide to all the British and Irish bee species since Edward Saunder's 1896 tome - The Hymenoptera Aculeata of the British Islands. The new field guide is 432 pages, with keys, species accounts and many photographs of nearly every species. In addition there are many illustrations by renowned insect illustrator Richard Lewington.

Ian Tew has been hard at work adding another big batch of around 300 images of many species. Do browse the gallery and enjoy these new species images.

A superbly illustrated key to the Chrysididae of the Nordic and Baltic countries (in English) is available as a free download. It should provide a very useful aid to identifying wasps in the family Chrysididae. The key includes all the British mainland species apart from Chrysis rutiliventris* . It can be downloaded here

* C. vanlithi - treated as a subspecies of C. rutiliventris by some authors - is included in the key.

The NBN are running a short project seeking to classify recorder motivations, and understand what support different recorders prefer. They're using both questionnaires and interviews, and need as wide a range of responses as possible to cover the diversity of circumstances and perspectives. If you collect data from the environment and would like to be included, further details are here:

A significant leap north west for Colletes hederae is apparent, with the discovery of a well established population around Llandudno in North Wales, on 8 October. A large nest aggregation was found on Little Orme as well as individuals at ivy and nesting in a roadside verge in nearby Llandudno. The latest map includes these new records.
Latest Map