One of Britain’s newest arrivals inhabits a kind of ingenious microflat sadly not available to human victims of the housing crisis. Constructing secure compartments with resin inside a grass stem or beetle nest is a neat trick performed by the small-headed resin bee, a tiny insect more familiar with Mediterranean climes, which has now taken up residence in the UK.
We are living in a golden era for species-hunters, if you like your species minuscule and obscure. I recently talked to David Notton, senior curator of Hymenoptera at the Natural History Museum, about the 25 stinging bees and wasps that have arrived in this country since 1978. We usually only hear scary stories about invaders such as the Asian hornet, a lethal predator of honeybees. (When a nest was discovered in Gloucestershire last year, the government quickly moved to exterminate it. We’ll find out this summer if it has succeeded or not.)
But most of these new arrivals are unobtrusive, such as the 5mm-long small-headed resin bee, and positive additions. As Notton points out, bees add to our range of pollinators, enhancing diversity in wild plants and benefiting the crops and fruit upon which we depend.
The European orchard bee was first spotted only a month ago – it is black and bright orange-red, and a pollinator of orchards. What’s not to love? Another new insect is the black bee-fly, an awesome fly with a comic-strip baddie’s scientific name Anthrax anthrax (Greek for “coal”), which recently revealed itself by posing on someone’s bee hotel.
Most obligingly, many new arrivals take up home where we live. Notton discovered the country’s second small-headed resin bee and another newcomer, viper’s bugloss mason bee, at Greenwich peninsula ecology park in London, a brownfield site converted into a nature reserve. Rare invertebrates love brownfield sites, where concrete and poor soil create Mediterranean conditions. These places are also often conveniently located near ports, where many arrivals disembark via a container or a crate.
Some new species bring disease or threaten native fauna or flora but most provide us with a thrilling spectator sport – if we’re looking closely.
A slimy basket case
Climate change and human globalisation assist most travelling species but many journeys are still mysterious. My favourite newcomer is a slime-covered, basket-shaped fungus which pitched up on a lawn in the Norfolk village of Hethersett this spring. Tony Leech, chairman of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists’ Society, initially thought it was the New Zealand basket fungus, previously found in west London – where the spores were presumably accidentally deposited by a human arrival at Heathrow. But the newcomer turns out to be a different species – the Australian basket fungus. How this charismatic-if-potentially-stinky Antipodean reached rural England is anyone’s guess.
Cameron’s rustic ruin
David Cameron has acquired a faux-rustic shepherd’s hut, in which he is hoping to write. We can use this news to rant about housing inequities but to be honest I’ve fantasised about scribbling in a garden shack ever since reading Roger Deakin, the Suffolk-based nature writer.
Our former prime minister has a knack for ruining my generation’s objects of desire – the Smiths, Converse, festivals. His latest act of cultural appropriation must mark peak shepherd’s hut. Will huts be like tattoos? Will the next generation survey our mess and wonder, what were they thinking?
