Throughout the year, the seasons are marked by the emergence and disappearance of wild things, be they flora, fauna or fungi (or a mix of all three). Everyone has their own markers to set the year by, and significant for me are the first blob of frogspawn in late winter, the first primrose in early spring and the first cuckoo and swift a few weeks later.
The shift into summer is marked by leafcutter and wool carder bees, and foxglove, allium and viper’s bugloss flowers. It’s a sad week in late summer when the swifts fly home, but then the ivy bees cheer me up by marking the end of the solitary-bee season with an extravagance worthy of an Ibiza closing party.
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Before the species’ arrival here in 2001, the season ended unremarkably, sort of fizzling out. Now, it goes out with a bang. The bee emerges in September, after developing into an adult underground. As its name suggests, it’s commonly found on ivy flowers, though will take nectar and pollen from other blooms when ivy is in short supply. It typically nests in loose soil, such as south-facing cliffs and banks, but also chooses closely clipped lawns and areas of bare soil in parks, allotments and gardens, nesting on both vertical and flat surfaces.
Despite being solitary (that is, having no social structure determined by a queen or workers), the ivy bee often nests in large aggregations, and numbers are such that the insects are sometimes mistaken for a swarm of honeybees. Males emerge around two weeks before the females and proceed to fly low over existing nests, waiting for potential partners to appear.
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The first female that does is hot property. The males are all keen to make their mating attempt, and hundreds of them pack tightly around her in a ‘mating ball’. Other females follow, and a frenzy of activity quickly develops, lasting for several days.
Once mated, the females each dig a tunnel around 30cm deep, then excavate several side chambers. Each of these tiny abodes is provisioned with pollen and nectar, and a single egg. The emerging grub consumes its larder, then undergoes several moults before metamorphosing into an adult. It emerges exactly a year later, ready for the whole process to start again.
The ivy bee (Colletes hederae) was first described by scientists in 1993 and is one of three similar-looking, late-flying species in the Colletes genus (the other two are Colletes succinctus, which is closely associated with heather, and Colletes halophilus, also known as the sea-aster bee).
In Britain, the species was first recorded in Dorset, but has steadily expanded its range east, west and north and is now common in most of England up to the Midlands, with scattered records in the far north of England and even into Scotland. In Wales, you’re most likely to encounter this fairly large bee along the coast.
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Here in Brighton, I find the bees on the flowering ivy that decorates the railway station, at the beach and in the supermarket car park. There’s a sandy path through the golf course that takes me and the dog onto the Downs, and if we’re lucky, we can wander through clouds of partying ivy bees. Fellow plot-holders from the allotment post about large swarms in our WhatsApp group, and I ask if I can sit with them in the hope of seeing a mating ball.
My favourite thing about this mating fracas is that both frogs and ivy bees do it, and the year is bookended by them. It’s these sort of natural events that keep me going, bring meaning to the year and ground me into the seasons, which are rapidly fraying at the edges thanks to climate change. Besides, who doesn’t want a year bookended by mating balls?
Top image: an ivy bee adult feeding on an ivy flower in England. Credit: imageBROKER/Kevin Sawford/Getty Images
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