SOLITARY BEES
Look around your garden, local park or nature reserve, and you’re sure to encounter a variety of bees, busily collecting pollen from our trees and flowers. Familiar to most of us are the honeybees – skilful producers of the sweet golden substance that many of us enjoy – and the fluffy bumblebees that buzz nosily around our blooms. Less well known though are the solitary bees, despite the fact that they comprise the majority of our bee species here in the UK – there are 240 or so different species in total. While honeybees and bumblebees are social bees, living in colonies together, solitary bees – as the name suggests – create their own nests. Some species of solitary bee will live alongside fellow bees in a type of social group, but interaction is limited and each bee will build a separate nest close to the others rather than having one shared nest. Solitary bees have an amazing array of nesting sites. Some burrow into our lawns, some nest in crumbling mortar and three species in Britain nest exclusively in old snail shells! Others nest in plant stems, cavities in dead wood or will take readily to manmade ‘bee hotels’ like we have at Millennium Country Park. The majority of solitary bees nest in the ground. One ground-
