Your GARDENING FORTNIGHT
Val explains the intertwined lives of bee flies, ground bees, blackbirds and thrushes
It wasn’t a glorious spring in Cold Aston this year and the temperature rarely got above 14C. That might have been alright, but for the strong northerly wind chill.
It was coat and hat weather here and that definitely affected the wildlife in my garden. The natural world is dynamic and that doesn’t mean hyperactive, or successful. It means that it follows a process that’s constantly changing and progressing in different ways. Wildlife don’t follow the same path every year. There are highs and lows that adjust year on year.
Not a good start for bee flies
Had it been a sunny spring, for instance, we would have seen lots of bee flies on the primroses. We had plenty of primrose flowers, because they enjoyed the cooler, damp conditions, but only a few bee flies. Bee flies look like bees, but they’re flies. You can identify them by their straight proboscis, which sticks out all the time. The Natural History Museum likens them to mini flying narwhals and I wish I’d thought of that, for it sums them up beautifully. They have one pair of wings, whereas proper bees have two. They make a high-pitched hum when they fly, but they only appear when temperatures reach 17C.
There are 10 species in the UK, but I think I’ve seen only two of them here. Once they’ve mated, the adult females turn into stealth bombers and look for the holes of ground-nesting bees. You can see them surveying the ground. Then the females coat their eggs with sand and gravel, to make them heavier, and flick lots of their eggs close to the holes just like carpet bombing. I don’t use these terms lightly, for (as Chris Packham says) nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’, which is actually a quote from Lord Tennyson in his In Memoriam A.H.H. poem.
The plight of the ground nesting bees
If the bee larva hatches near a hole, it heads underground and eats all the pollen left for the baby bees. Then the larva goes through a second metamorphosis and grows into a large, sedentary creature before devouring the bee grubs. Lots of this sort of savage stuff happens in a natural garden. That’s wildlife.
If the ground-nesting bees don’t suffer carnage from the bee flies, adult blackbirds hoover them up instead. They scurry round the lawn collecting them in their beaks, just as the bees are provisioning their nests with pollen. Our most common mining bee is a silvery-black one named the Ashy mining bee (Andrena cineraria). Some years the lawn is littered with volcanoes of soil. This year, there have only been a few.
Blackbi
