As well as workshops at the upcoming BWARS AGM, two other opportunities to learn how to identify aculeates are listed in the BWARS Diary here

2015 AGM - Oxford University Natural History Museum, Saturday & Sunday 17 - 18 October

The provisional programme of workshops and talks is available for download here

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