Back to the wall of bees

I first wrote about the bees in this wall seven years ago.  It is an old cob wall near the church in Nether Heyford, Northamptonshire, one of several similar walls in the village.  The wall is hundreds of years old and is home to hundreds or even thousands of bees.  They are all solitary bees and most are either hairy-footed flower bees (Anthophora plumipes), common mourning cuckoo bees (Melecta albifrons), or red mason bees (Osmia bicornis). When I visited a month ago most of the bees I saw were male hairy-footed flower bees, hanging about in the hope of finding a freshly emerged female.  When I returned last weekend all the males had gone (having mated and died) and the females were busy provisioning their nests in the holes in the wall.

This one is just leaving for a foraging trip.

Here is a female returning with pollen and nectar.

The bees remember roughly where their nests are but sometimes take a few moments to locate the right hole.  Their navigation might be put off by me standing in the way.

Each nest has several cells, each containing an egg and enough pollen and nectar to sustain the growing larva.  These two bees were shovelling loose material back into their nests, presumably to seal in a cell they had provisioned and completed.

Aggregations of hairy-footed flower bees attract a kleptoparasitic cuckoo bee, Melecta albifrons.  The females of this bee loiter near the nest entrances, hoping to sneak in and lay their own eggs while the owners are away.

The male bees hanging around the wall this time were red mason bees (Osmia bicornis).  Their flight season is slightly later so most of the females were yet to emerge.

Here is a short video to give a flavour of what was going on.  Three species are visible, female hairy-footed flower bees (round and black), common mourning cuckoo bees (thinner and dark), and male red mason bees (small and red).

A few yards away in the churchyard I saw Melecta albifrons,

ashy mining bees (Andrena cineraria),

and tawny mining bees (Andrena fulva).

Mining bees have a similar lifestyle to flower bees and mason bees but they dig their nests in the ground.  They also attract their own specific cuckoo bees.

Back at the wall I found a spider that had just captured a cuckoo bee.  The spider was also hiding in one of the holes and had built webs across several of the others.  It was in the process of wrapping the bee, which was still alive, and then appeared to bite it, presumably with a venomous or paralysing bite.

I think this is probably a female noble false widow (Steatoba nobilis).  This spider first appeared in Devon 150 years ago, having been imported from the Canary Islands in a consignment of bananas, and is now widespread across the southern half of the UK.  For a description of the false widow spider and some amazing photos see Jason Steel's website.

Spring is later up here in the north so I hoped some of the local male A. plumipes would still be around.  Yesterday I was in Morpeth, 10 miles north of here and 230 miles north of my mother's village, and there they were.  I don't know where the nest site is in Morpeth but I saw several male bees sipping nectar in the town centre.

There were more females on the wing, this one showing how her proboscis splits to show the tongue and folds away underneath her "chin" when not needed.

The Morpeth hairy-footed flower bees were first recorded last year and are spreading south through Northumberland, presumably from the original outlier population in the Alnwick Garden.  I hope it won't be long before they reach Newcastle.