As usual there has been a steady stream of requests for identifications of aculeates, often from photographs. Helping new people to understand how to name the insects in this group, what to look for, whether the insect even is an aculeate, is an important part of the support BWARS offers. Much of this support is through the workshops held at various venues around the country.

Buglife have produced a report detailing the results of a survey for seven bee species in south west England.

The report presents the findings of the project’s first ground-truthing surveys from May to August 2014. The objectives of these surveys were:

• To confirm the presence of target species on sites with historic records -
• To evaluate habitat suitability on surveyed sites -
• To add to information on the autecology of target species

BWARS members Mike Edwards and Jeremy Early have collaborated with Scottish Natural Heritage to produce a guide to some of the common and more readily identified bees of Scotland. The guide can be downloaded here

BWARS member Ian Tew has been busy upoading some 230 images of bees and wasps in 23 genera, significantly improving our online image collection. Most of the images were taken in south Wales. View the images in the species accounts.

Stuart Roberts has added a a new map  showing the results of the 2014 monitoring project for Bombus hypnorum. This includes 3,290 lines of data. 224 new dots have been added to the map in 2014, which represents a more than a 20% increase over 2013.

A number of excellent videos showing behavioural aspects of various aculeates have been added to the species accounts.

Many thanks to John Walters and Vivian Russell for providing the video sequences.

The new video sequences can be viewed on the following pages:

Anthidium manicatum

Eumenes coarctatus

Mellinus arvensis

Species accounts for a further 59 species have been added to this website. These are the accounts published in Part 8 of the Provisional atlas of aculeate Hymenoptera of Britain and Ireland.

Species added are listed on the right.

Links to all the species accounts are here: https://www.bwars.com/index.php?q=species_list

BWARS members Nigel Jones and Ian Cheeseborough collaborated on a 13 year project to discover and map the aculeates of Shropshire. The results are summarised in a new publication A provisional atlas of the bees, wasps and ants of Shropshire

Kent Field Club have published the Bumblebees of Kent by Nikki Gammans and Geoff Allan.  The 170 pages include more than 80 colour photographs and updated distribution maps and species profiles of the bumblebees of Kent.  This book aims to provide a comprehensive guide to bumblebee ecology and offers an inclusive introduction to their identification.  It discusses the importance of bumblebees, their decline and how we can help reverse this.

An Identification workshop will be held at Dinton Pastures

Details:

An introduction to the Hymenoptera aculeata