Secretary: Catherine M. Jones (catherinemjones7@gmail.com)

The BWARS Committee invite all our members to join us at the World Museum Liverpool on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October for the BWARS AGM and member’s weekend.

The BWARS members’ weekend is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people and it is mainly informal and informative, with the official business conducted on Sunday morning at the AGM.

On Saturday there will be a number of workshops for members - from beginners and improvers to the… Read more

The UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS) continues in 2018

The UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS) has been set up to gather additional evidence to inform research and conservation of the insects that provide such an important service. BWARS is supporting PoMS, which is a partnership of a wide range of conservation and research organisations.

The first way that BWARS members can help PoMS is by continuing to send in your records to BWARS via the usual routes! BWARS data forms a major strand of evidence and is being made available for further analysis… Read more

Recorded for the first time in Britain during 2017. More details will follow.

Advice from Jim Bacon at CEH:

To hide the maps go to:

https://www.bwars.com/admin/structure/pages/nojs/operation/node_view/handlers/node_view_panel_context/content

https://www.bwars.com/admin/structure/pages/nojs/operation/node_view/handlers/node_view__bee-page/content

… Read more

In April 2017 Rob Mills photographed a distinctive insect in his garden. This turned out to be the bee-fly Anthrax anthrax, a species never confirmed from Britain before. The bee-fly was sitting on a bee hotel in his garden near Cambridge, on a log drilled with holes containing solitary bee brood cells.

This bee-fly has been referred to as the Black Bee-fly, or the Anthracite Bee-fly, and its rather alarming scientific name of Anthrax derives from a Greek word for coal. The fly’s body is black, as are its wings apart from a clear zone at the apex and around the hind… Read more

A small species with a body length of 5–7 mm. In the field it most resembles Nomada conjungens Herrich-Schäffer and Nomada flavoguttata (Kirby) in both size and coloration and could easily be passed over as being those species. The main distinguishing characters (colour and form of the labrum in the female, and shape of the intermediate flagellar segments in the male) are best viewed under a binocular microscope. The species is included in a recent key to the bees of Switzerland (Amiet et al., 2007).

BWARS member Paddy Saunders has detailed an alarming 75% decline in Cornish sites for Eucera longicornis - longhorn bees. Read the report here: http://kernowecology.co.uk/eucera.html

Martin Harvey leads this course introducing a range of pollinating insects, including the variety of different bees and hoverflies: how to find them, how to recognise them and what their role is in pollination. We’ll be able to explore the rich flower meadows and hedgerows of Forty Hall Farm.  A number of projects have been set up recently to help record and conserve pollinators, and you’ll be able to find out how to take part in these.

Venue: Forty Hall Farm, Forty Hill, Enfield EN2 9HA

Price: £35

Must be booked via Epping Forest FSC - for full… Read more

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