I simply can’t let the season pass without a mention of my favourite bee, the bee I find most attractive, and one of the easiest – for me, anyway – to recognise. This is, of course, the Ivy bee (Colletes hederae).

These bees are usually on the wing from early September through to November, though I think those dates can be affected somewhat by factors like the weather and the availability of their food source, Ivy pollen and nectar. And the male bees tend to emerge a couple of weeks earlier so they are ready to pounce on females as soon as they appear.

I had wondered what would happen if they emerge before the Ivy flowers are open but an article on the Sussex Wildlife Trust website explains that they will also take nectar from other flowers, though the females gather the pollen they deposit in their nest burrows for their larvae to feed on exclusively from Ivy.

As it is a relatively late flowering plant, Ivy is also popular with many other insects, and those shown here are just a tiny sampling of the many species of flies and hoverflies, bees and wasps, and butterflies like Red admiral that I’ve been seeing on our local Ivy this year.