Tag Archives: Common carder bee

The scabious and the bee

19 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in autumn, insects, wildflowers

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This has been such a strange year for flora and fauna. Usually, in mid autumn, I’d be checking what insects I could find on the Devil’s-bit scabious flowers, as they are one of the last sources of nourishment for many of our flying insects. Not this year. The summer drought seems to have led to a lot of our local insects either failing to breed second and third generations or, perhaps, just dying off earlier than usual due to a lack of food, and the Devil’s-bit scabious flowers are nowhere near as lush as they normally are. When I walked through a local nature reserve this week, I found just one Common carder bee on the scabious … just one! It will be very interesting to see what effect this changing climate has on next year’s flora and fauna when they begin to grow and emerge.

Companions

31 Wednesday Aug 2022

Posted by in insects

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As our hot dry summer draws to a close, flowers are in short supply so, sometimes, hungry critters just have to share. Here, a male Red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius), left, shares with a Common carder bee (Bombus pascuorum). (Yes, I know the Red-tailed doesn’t actually have a red tail and it certainly doesn’t look like the images I had been searching through when trying to put a name to it, but my friendly local Twitter expert tells me ‘males get sun bleached rather quickly’ and assures me this identification is correct. This is precisely why I don’t really ‘do’ bees!)

220831 Bombus lapidarius MALE n Bombus pascuorum

305/366 Insecting

31 Saturday Oct 2020

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Despite the appalling weather – frequent heavy rain and occasional strong winds – we’ve been experiencing over the last couple of weeks, I have managed still to find a few hardy insects, persisting by cunningly finding sheltered places to avoid the worst of the inclement conditions.

These bees seem to have the right idea. On the left is a Buff-tailed bumblebee, which I watched emerging from inside the cosy, fluffy duvet of an Old man’s beard seedhead and, on the right, a Common carder that seems to have the same idea and be looking for a place to snuggle down.

Also looking cosy, these Common earwigs were huddling in the cups of umbellifer seedheads.

201031 common darters

Common darters have still been active in the more sheltered spots during the occasional sunny periods, these at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park.

The last of this year’s brood of Ivy bees were still feeding their grubs. They had made use of a rabbit scrape to excavate the underground burrows where their eggs are laid, grubs hatch and pupate and will remain until emerging as adult bees next autumn.

260/366 Searching the scabious, 1

16 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by in insects, plants, wildflowers

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In recent weeks, when the weather has been fine and the air relatively still, I’ve been spending time searching the Devil’s-bit scabious for bees. Not just any bees, but four scarce and endangered bees. This is part of Buglife’s ‘Searching for Scabious’ project, which

aims to improve our understanding of the distribution and conservation status of some of Wales’ rarest and most threatened solitary bees – the Large Scabious Mining Bee (Andrena hattorfiana) and its associated cuckoo, the Armed nomad bee (Nomada armata), and Small Scabious Mining Bee (Andrena marginata) and its cuckoo, the Silver-sided nomad bee (Nomada argentata).

I wasn’t familiar with these bees and am not very good at bee identification in general but Liam Olds, Buglife’s local conservation officer, has put together an excellent explainer video, which can be accessed on YouTube, so I thought I’d join the search.

Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to find any of the scarce bees at the two local sites where Devil’s-bit scabious grows in abundance (and neither has Liam, which was reassuring for me re my search skills but bad news for the bees). The bees I did find most commonly were the appropriately named Common carder (Bombus pascuorum) (below, left) and the Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) (below, right).

Liam very kindly helped to identify the other small bees I found. These lovely little furrow bees are either the White-zoned furrow bee (Lasioglossum leucozonium) or the Bull-headed furrow bee (Lasioglossum zonulum) – the two species are too similar to tell them apart without closer examination.

I also found several of these more distinctive individuals, the Wood-carving leafcutter bee (Megachile ligniseca). You can find out more about them, and watch a little video of their nest-building skills, on the BWARS website. Meantime, I’m heading back to the scabious for another look.

251/366 Bs and Ts

07 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in insects, plants, wildflowers

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Bumblebees and Teasels – I’m not sure why but they seem to be a match made in heaven.

In fact, bumblebees are the insects I see most often nectaring on Teasels, though the Burnet moths also find Teasel to their taste, as did this Meadow brown butterfly yesterday.

153/365 The geranium and the bee

02 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in 365DaysWildin2019, flowers, insects, nature, wildflowers

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190602 geranium and bee

This photo was actually taken yesterday because, being the occasional numpty that I am, I didn’t take my camera with me when I went out for a stroll and some groceries this afternoon, after the rain had cleared. The bee is a Common carder (Bombus pascuorum) but I’m not sure about the geranium. Although it’s growing beneath a hedgerow in a rural lane, I think it’s a garden escape, as its description doesn’t fit with the native geraniums in my plant book. Whatever it is, it’s obviously tasty … if you’re a bee.