Of Snailshell Bees and Where the Wild Bees Live.

On Wednesday, to my great delight I saw the astonishing snail shell bee in action.

Earlier this year Trevor had very kindly emailed to tell me of a probable Osmia bicolour nesting location quite close by and so, on the only hopeful bee spotting day last week, we spent a fascinating couple of hours on a chilly but dry morning scanning a local south facing scrubby bank.

We were looking for the female Osmia bicolour bee who so charmingly finds  ready made homes in empty snail shells. She is quite small and extremely pretty with brilliantly coloured dark ginger hairs on her abdomen and a black head and thorax and not that easy to see in amongst the scrub and leaves. The first one we saw was just resting in a fleeting patch of sun and if she had been the only one I saw I would have been happy but like any good TV reality show the walk just got better.

 

None of my photos do justice to this lovely bee and her endeavours.. They are very quick and I had great trouble trying to focus but it is a record.

We then saw Bee number two, first examining an empty snail shell and then moving it around .. presumably to get the opening in the right position and sheltered from rain. We could not quite see how she moved it but from what I have read and blogged about before, (see my more extensive  “Bee-on-a-Broomstick” post  from 2010) they pull rather than push, holding onto the ground with their jaws and dragging the shell.  How ever they do it, it’s some feat…its a very large shell for a very small bee!

Along the way we also saw many dainty little grizzled skipper butterflies for which the site is being managed and protected. Trevor explained that this was the perfect time to see them and we must have seen about a dozen making the most of a briefly sunny morning. Their status is “HIGH” on the Butterfly Conservation priority list and they are becoming increasingly rare.

The grizzled skipper

We saw a couple more Osmias as we walked along and hundreds of snail shells.. why there I wonder? And then just as we reached the end of the bank one bee flew down into the grass to an almost completely invisible shell tucked in amongst some tufty leaves and I watched in complete fascination as she flew backwards and forwards with more pieces of dried grass and twigs to cover up her home.
It was transfixing! She was so very quick and so very busy, bringing now a short piece, then a longer piece and on one occasion a grass stem so long that its trailing end caught on all the surrounding tall grasses and had to be abandoned,  but not until she had made several frustrated approaches and landing attempts. The piece of grass must have been at least 8 times longer than the bee and her efforts were valiant, but you could see they were doomed. “No no”we said “get a smaller piece”.. its hard not to get involved!

You can just see the bee, the pale snail shell is just to her left. The long, abandoned, pale twig runs almost the full length of the foreground.

Here she is just over the shell having dropped off another stick.

We had to leave her to her building. She will have laid her eggs, maybe 5, in this shell nest, carefully partitioning off each cell with chewed grass and sealing up the end with more chewed grass and tiny pieces of stone. If all goes well the eggs will develop and the new bees will stay in their exquisitely designed home until the following spring.

I should add that we were very careful where we put our feet that day! I think I will be joining the Jain monks soon and shudder to think how many tiny things perish under a careless footfall.

We saw other wonderful things.. the tiny pretty field pansy, a huge female cuckoo bumblebee Bombus sylvestris, a brilliant Small Copper butterfly…

  

A beautiful lesser 3 bar moth…

an elegant green sawfly, beeflies and many more unidentifiable small mining bees,  but the snail shell bee was treat of the day for me.

Where do the Wild Bees live?

At the shows I am often asked “where do bees live” and there is no one easy answer, their nest choices are many and varied and I am learning more and more about their ingenuity and resourcefulness all the time.

Here in the Empty Garden I do, now, at last, have some Mason bees taking up residence in my bee house. 

A little black Hairy Footed Flower Bee has spent days excavating the roots of the struggling strawberry plants in the strawberry pot. She has left spoil heaps of soil on the paving stones and is constantly whizzing back and forth on a sunny day. Her high pitched zizzzz is quite distinctive.

There are big mining bees constantly trying to dig holes in the lawn and my friend Matthew gave me the remains of a Bombus pascuorum nest which had been found in a compost heap.

Many people have told me of Bumble Bee nests in birdboxes, often now the Tree Bumble Bee Bombus hypnorum and I have had several accounts of Leafcutter bees nesting in flower pots. Bombus lapidarius might be under your shed or in amongst tree roots.. and silly mining bees love to nest on well trodden paths with some predicable results.

On Friday I walked up behind the reservoir and found two sunny rape field margins where the pale dried surface of the earth was spotted with dark mounds of newly excavated damp soil. It looked like a little outbreak of measles.

 

A mining bee colony, Grafham, 18th May

Tiny mining bees were constantly coming and going, accompanied by what I think was a sand wasp who ran in and out of everything, both the bee nests and the newly formed cracks.

 

A pollen laden bee pauses over its nest hole before diving down

Sand wasp (??) emerging.

The mining bees are very funny and tend to sit just inside the nest.. in this field of pimples you know you are being watched by many tiny eyes.

A big Andrena bee was also investigating the holes but was far too large to get in. I was not really sure what it was doing.. whether it was lost perhaps or looking for a start.. why not use an existing burrow and save work, but these would have been a very tight fit. I do know that different species nest alongside each other but this seemed to be the only one of its kind here.  I wonder what the outcome was?

 

The Andrena bee investigating a hole..for size??

and taking a break, looking rather disconsolate after trying many holes.

The more I watch and learn, the more questions I have.. and biggest question of all is how can I possibly have enough time in one short life to answer even a few of them??  :)….
eg: Just why are there so many damp loving snails on a sunny dry bank in Cambridgeshire and why are the starlings stealing chunks of my newly planted lavender and chamomile. I read that they use it to fumigate their nests.. clever things!

Four More of the Big Six bees…

If the recent wet and cold weather has done one good thing it has kept me indoors at the drawing board and able to complete the Big 6 commission. No time to blog about them individually but here are some rather basic scans of the last four paintings.

Bombus hortorum The Garden Bumble Bee

Bombus lucorum the White Tailed Bumble bee

Bombus pascuorum The Common Carder Bee

And the gorgeous big Bombus lapidarius, The Redtailed Bumble Bee..almost everyone’s favourite bumble bee.

All painted on Fabriano HP in watercolour approx 9 x 9 inches.

I think I have mentioned before that I use Graham paints which are just fab for what I need for the bees. I work with quite thick paint and like to be able to push it around quite a bit and of course they use honey as a humectant which is not only very apt but also keeps them moist.

I did a little more work on some of them after these scans but didn’t update the images. It’s such a nuisance as they don’t fit on the scanner in one go and after spending so many hours on each one I am always worried about carelessly damaging them so I keep scanning to a minimum. My very cheap all singing all dancing multifunction scanner/printer/fax/copier etc is a crude tool and loses all the subtlety of the originals but at least it’s a record of a month’s hard work.

These bees have been with me now for so long that it’s very hard to see them go. I do get ridiculously attached to each one, probably because I have worked so hard trying to bring them to life.. but I do have 3 more commissions to come!

Also I have some very exciting bee sighting news! I have seen my first snail shell bee in action…! More of that later …

The Early Bumble bee, Bombus pratorum

In my box of bee “models”, which have proved to be so surprisingly popular at my Buzz shows, I have a little family. It’s a Bombus pratorum trio; the queen,  little fluffy male and a tiny neat worker. If anyone is frightened of bees, learning about this endearing family usually does the trick.

The males are particularly attractive and they were all over the cotoneaster in the churchyard here last year, so I chose the male for this set of paintings. They are also delightfully hairy, with long silky hair which sticks up here and there. There’s a bit of a rakish air about them, quite different from the short haired B lapidarius who looks like a piece of velvet. They are also a  lemony yellow, not the orange yellow of Bombus terrestris.

Laura at Bumblebee.org. (just the nicest bumblebee site on the net) says this:

“Once a male has left the nest he does not return. His sole aim is to mate, and he will patrol a circuit laying down a scent at strategic spots in order to attract a newly emerged queen who will find the scent so irresistible that she will allow him to mate with her.

The only other thing he does is drink nectar. So he will stay outside all night, usually clinging to the underside of a flower for some protection from rain etc. Often he will choose the same flower night after night. Then once the morning sun comes out he has just enough strength to climb - in the UK they are often too cold to fly - up to the flower entrance to drink some nectar and warm up ready for more scent patrolling.”

 

The tiny, fluffy, Bombus pratorum on cotoneaster,
Watercolour and pencil on Arches HP.

Easton Workshops and a Painting!

It’s been a VERY busy week. The Empty Garden has been begging for attention, so seeds have been sown and plants lined up for planting and more lists made.  I held one of my “Bugs Beasts and Botanicals” painting workshops at Easton Walled Gardens with Judith, Michael, Sue, Elaine and Lucy. Thanks all for coming and for your fantastic input and enthusiasm. It was so enjoyable.
The workshops are all about looking..looking hard and looking again and appreciating and developing ones own abilities, aptitudes and enthusiasms.  I am going to write a post about them in more detail soon.

I have another full days workshop at Easton this coming week. I would just like a little more sun if possible… but to be honest just to be up at Easton is so inspirational and such a delight, whatever the weather.

And at last I got down to painting the gorgeous Buff Tailed Bumble bee. She is surveying her prospects from a Mahonia leaf. It’s number one of my rather delayed commissions. I have not had time to scan this one and irritatingly it is too big to scan in one go so it involves lots of faffing about with Photoshop..so for now photos will have to do. 

 

I particularly like the way bees pause on leaves to take a break .. I am also thankful because you can get a good look at them..and of course, them at you.

The garden has been full of solitary bees and the valiant mining bee from my last post was prospecting in the lawn again. Thanks to my very knowledgeable bee mentor Alan Phillips, I think it is the lovely Andrena nitida, just one of the over 230 other British Bees I have yet to paint…!

So much to do, so little time!

A Tawny Mining Bee and thanks to Nature in Art.

I am back from my 10 days over Easter at Nature in Art, having met so many interesting and bee friendly people and made quite a few converts too.
I am also much more knowledgeable about honey bees and the great work done by Bees Abroad. Their observation hive was fascinating.
One day I arrived early to hear the bees making an extra loud buzzing, easily audible from behind the closed shutters. When Brian opened up, it was clear the excitement was caused by new loads of pale pollen arriving.   A frenzy of waggle dancing was going on.  If I read their directions correctly they were collecting from the nearby rape field which had just sprung into flower.

Brian, one of the project leaders of Bees Abroad, works in Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana. He wore a very cool African robe and hat on a couple of days and will be giving a talk tomorrow night (Tuesday) at the Museum. entitled “My Beekeeping Exploits”. Will you be appearing fully kitted out  Brian?? :)

The Bee Exhibition “Winged Saviours” continues at Nature in Art until April 29th and here is a brilliant winged photo of director Simon Trapnell from the local newspaper

Back home in the Empty Garden we are busy trying to make it not quite so empty and I will be posting a list of wildlife friendly plants I am trying soon… but, joy of joys, a brilliantly ginger Tawny Mining bee, Andrena fluva, paid a visit to the Shed. Her freshly emerged colours are wonderful. The photo does not really show the difference between the colour on the thorax and on the abdomen. One is deep russet and the other a brighter ginger.. very beautiful !

I can’t find any traces of her typical nesting volcanoes in the grass but later that day another mining bee was trying to dig a burrow right in the middle of our hard packed and unforgiving mud patch of a lawn.  I felt very sorry for her, we can barely get a fork into this concrete hard surface. I watched her valiantly trying to excavate a hole and longed to give a helping hand but common sense must have prevailed and she flew away, hopefully to find somewhere softer to dig. Again she was brilliantly coloured with paler ginger thorax and black shiny abdomen with small white hairs on her legs.

I took a few seconds of film and although not in focus ( I WILL improve) was good enough for me to see her broad face with white hairs.  I hope to get an ID and will update this post. She seemed not at all concerned by my presence… if she noticed me at all.
Happy digging little bees!

Bees and Flowers, A Week at Twigworth

I am in the middle of a fantastic week here at Nature in Art at Twigworth Glos. Eight lovely artists joined me at the weekend for 2 days of drawing, painting and talking about all things art and nature. We drew bugs, beasts, twigs, flowers and plants,  found ground nesting bees, watched huge bumble bees in the willows and mahonias, spotted hairy footed flower bees on the pulmonaria, saw little mason bees peeping out of holes in the walls, watched bee flies and hover flies and more. We exchanged ideas, knowledge, stories and painting tips and, as always, I learn as much about painting, drawing and life from the company of such interesting and accomplished people as I hope they learn from me.  Thank you Lyn, Sally, Margaret, Owen, Hazel, Lyn, Sarah and Penny for making it such an really enjoyable weekend.

Now I am Artist in Residence for a week and sharing a room with the Bees Abroad Charity. They have a fantastic stand and the observation hive is riveting! I am learning so much about honey bees both here and abroad.
 

Brian also has a small piece of a stingless bee’s nest from Ghana on show along with some of the microscopic bees.. ( black specs on the right!)

In the next room there is a display of excellent work from Gloucestershire Botanical Art Society. A few bees and bugs have crept in there too.

 

I have a selection of “Buzz” paintings and sketchbooks and of course my well travelled models who are doing a great job in promoting the understanding of our wild bees. Even timid children who think they are frightened of bees cannot resist a close encounter with a little mason bee.

Out in the grounds there are Bumble bees all over a big yellow Mahonia.    
Kevin has put up his bee boxes.

and… delight! delight!… the hairy footed flower bees are whizzing around the pulmonaria.

We are all here until Easter Monday. Do come along and have a chat if you can. I can tell you the home made quiches and cakes are wonderful!

Bees for Real and Bees in Art. “Winged Saviours” at Nature in Art Gallery, Gloucester..Oh, and me too!

I am just getting prepared for 10 days at the wonderful Nature in Art Gallery at Twigworth, Gloucestershire where I am teaching a two day drawing and painting course on Saturday and Sunday, and am Artist in Residence  for a week.

At the same time to celebrate all things bee there is a small exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptures. “Winged Saviours” runs from March 27th - April 29th It will be fascinating and I am so delighted to be included in the exhibition.

“A small exhibition focusing on bees, a subject matter that has provided inspiration to artists, not just because of the intricate beauty of the bee, but because, in a sense, we should see them as ‘winged saviours’.

We have gathered together a selection of work from public and private collections, and had a number of pieces produced especially for this exhibition to help put a focus on the bee through art.

Four prints from Graham Sutherland’s famous ‘Bee Series’ will be shown amongst prints by other printmakers like Louise Bird, Greg Poole and Robert Gillmor. Russian artist Vadim Gorbatov and painters like Val Littlewood, Mark Rowney, Janet Melrose, Gary Woodley, Clifford and Rosemary Elliis and Jane Tudge help provide a great diversity of approach.”

 
Graham Sutherland… from his bee series”

Read more about the exhibition HERE

I am so looking forward to my time there. The workshop I am teaching will be about drawing, painting and looking harder at the smaller things in the natural world.  I am hoping it will be fine weather so we can make the most of the lovely wild grounds there.

Live bees!

At the same time there will be a stand from the charity Bees Abroad (www.beesabroad.org.uk)  together with an observation hive. How wonderful! I am not sure I will be able to drag myself away from it to do any work. Bees Abroad are a small charity who work to support beekeeping in small communities abroad.

“They use their expertise, working in the local community group to develop a viable project which will become self-sustainable. Using indigenous bees and techniques appropriate for each location, Bees Abroad offers training and support in beekeeping including making hives and protective clothing from local materials, managing honeybees, collecting honey safely and handling and storing it hygenically.”

It will be a fascinating 10 days.

Do come along if you can and say hello.  Nature in Art Gallery is rather a hidden gem!

Basking Bee Fly

As well as more and more bees, including a Tree Bumble Bee , B hypnorum and the most beautiful big queen Common Carder Bee,  B pascuorum, the funny little bee flies are making an appearance. They, too, are feeding on the buckthorn.
Bee flies, Bombylius major, are experts at hovering. I watched one hover by a flower almost motionless while pushing that long snout deep into the flower. I don’t think bees can hover and feed at the same time.. but I could be wrong.

This bee fly had been flying with its characteristic, dart-and-hover movement just above the paving stones, then came to rest on the side of the shed. In flight its wings are a blur, but here you can see the beautiful dark markings on the forewings reminiscent of some dragonflies.

Although they look a little like bees they are true flies and parasitic on some bees and wasps. It seems they need to keep warm and according to the Natural History Museum :

“Many individuals fly along the ground to absorb heat, whilst others fly further up trees to maximise direct sunlight.

When cold, the bee-flies perch vertically, pointing upwards, and they can remain in this position for a week or even longer (Knight 1967)”

I have not seen a motionless bee fly pointing upwards yet :)

I walked up by the reservoir today in the glorious sun, where dozens of bumble bees were feeding on the willows and cruising low to the ground looking for nest sites.



And the early blackthorns were swarming with hundreds of tiny solitary bees. I just wish I knew what they were!