Bees in Britain - Table of Species

Bees in Britain - Chapter 5 - The Genera

Welcome to the BWARS website - help us improve it further

We're sure you'll agree that the updated website is a huge improvement on our old website. A colossal amount of volunteer effort has gone into creating the hundreds of pages you'll find here - adding thousands of photographs, editing and proof reading lots and lots of text. Inevitably, errors will have crept in (we've already found quite a few). So, if you spot anything wrong, no matter how small, please do email one of the website managers and tell us about it. We'll try to correct things as quickly as possible.

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The genus Pemphredon has more than its fair share of synonyms amongst its species and the fauna of Great Britain and Ireland has several species with more than their 'fair share' of these. Pemphredon lethifer may be readily bred from nests in the pith of old bramble stems. The nest architecture is distinctive, a spiral tunnel with cells 'dropping off the spiral parallel to the outside of the stem at intervals. However, the resulting adults are confusingly varied, both in size and finer details of the ratios of different body parts. This small-scale variability has given rise to a wide… Read more

An 116 year wait is over....

To celebrate the launch of its new website, BWARS is extremely pleased to offer the previously unpublished text for Bees of Britain as a free download. This provides the first significant work about Britain's Bees since 1896! It will be an essential aid to anyone wishing to study native bees in Britain and further afield.

Our thanks go to members Robin Williams, Mike Edwards and the team of authors for working so tirelessly to complete this important project.

Sculptural patterns on the thorax of the four UK species

The photographs here are kindly provided by Villu Soon. They show the sculpture of the thorax of the four UK species. These photos should help to clarify the descriptions given in Morgan (1984).

Atlas 10; Target Species

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At last, an introductory text to British bees... 

In 1998 BWARS members started work on a project to write and publish an introduction to the bees of Britain. The project was considered particularly worthwhile as there had been no publication providing an adequate overview of this large and varied group of aculeates since Edward Saunders' 1896 classic work. The lack of a good modern introductory text covering all British bee genera was a huge gap in the literature on British aculeates.

Since the decision… Read more

Speed labelling

All specimens should carry full data on the labels. This essential task can be time-consuming, and here Sam Droege gives some tips on how to speed this process up without losing accuracy.

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Pinning specimens

This critical task has to be performed properly if specimens are going to be identified. Sam Droege demonstrates the best in good practice.

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