By Gavin Ramsay
[A female heather bee at Tayport Heath, Fife, in late August 2023. Photo: Norval Strachan, reproduced with permission and under iRecord’s Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC.]
We looked at another Colletes bee, the ivy bee (Colletes hederae), in an earlier article in this series. Somewhat surprisingly for a bee with a recent rapid spread through England and Wales, there have been no additional locations with confirmed sightings in Scotland since 2021 but the new season for this species will soon be upon us so do keep alert for it when the ivy comes into flower!
This time we look at a related and much more widespread bee in Scotland, the heather bee (Colletes succinctus). It is noticeably smaller than a honey bee at about 10mm long with a warm brown thorax and a boldly striped abdomen. This species is on the wing from July to late September. It can be seen at scattered locations across the mainland in heather areas and is particularly frequent along the western and northern coasts. It also appears around Inverness, in the Hebrides, on Orkney and sporadically elsewhere. As always with wild bees, it could be overlooked in some areas. Although usually feeding on ling heather you can also see it on thistles, some legumes and other flowers. In fact, feeding preferences are the easy way of discriminating this species from its close relatives such as the Davies plasterer bee. Colletes daviesanus prefers flowers from the daisy family, the Asteraceae.
Plasterer bee? This genus usually nests in light, sandy soils and line their short burrows with a thin clear polyester lining. The secretion comes from the Dufour gland and the bees’ fused mandibles help in the plastering of this secretion to form a transparent and waterproof lining for their cells.
Some of the aggregations of nests of the heather bee are huge, comprising tens of thousands of bees. Elsewhere the bee may nest singly and unobtrusively. You might come across it in July when males and their antics make nesting aggregations conspicuous or a little later in its season when females are provisioning nests and collecting food from heather or thistles, often near the sea.
It may be worth looking out for a small bee that parasitises nests of the heather bee, Epeolus cruciger. Although this has only been rarely recorded in southern Scotland, it could be present, unnoticed, elsewhere.
An Inverness beekeeper, Michael Balmain, posted pictures and videos of an aggregation of heather bees on our Facebook group at the end of July last year, including a male sitting on his finger (below). We also reproduce here a female heather bee, captured by Norval Strachan on a visit to a coastal heathland site in Fife (header photo).
Photo: Michael Balmain, reproduced with permission.
As always, Steven Falk’s Flickr pages provide a wide range of images of the bee, its habitat and its parasites.