BWARS AGM
The programme for 21st and 22nd October 2017 - Liverpool Museum can be downloaded HERE

Secretary: Catherine M. Jones (catherinemjones7@gmail.com)

The BWARS Committee invite all our members to join us at the World Museum Liverpool on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October for the BWARS AGM and member’s weekend.

The BWARS members’ weekend is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people and it is mainly informal and informative, with the official business conducted on Sunday morning at the AGM.

In April 2017 Rob Mills photographed a distinctive insect in his garden. This turned out to be the bee-fly Anthrax anthrax, a species never confirmed from Britain before. The bee-fly was sitting on a bee hotel in his garden near Cambridge, on a log drilled with holes containing solitary bee brood cells.

BWARS member Paddy Saunders has detailed an alarming 75% decline in Cornish sites for Eucera longicornis - longhorn bees. Read the report here: http://kernowecology.co.uk/eucera.html

Nick Owens' new book - The Bees of Norfolk will be published on 1 May 2017. More information can be downloaded here

Defra issued a press release on 20 September 2016 regarding a Gloucestershire record for Asian hornet Vespa velutina
See: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-hornet-identified-in-gloucestershire

BWARS' information sheet on this wasp can be found here

Researchers at Liverpool University are assessing the presence of Arsenophonus bacterial symbionts in UK solitary bees and require expert volunteers to collect and identify speciemens. Read more

A revised and updated checklist of the UK aculeate fauna has just been published covering all of the species of interest to BWARS. The checklist compiled after much painstaking work by George R. Else, Barry Bolton & Gavin R. Broad can be downloaded freely from the Biodiversity Data Journal at: http://biodiversitydatajournal.com/articles.php?id=8050

BWARS member Paddy Saunders has produced a new atlas of bumblebees Bumblebees of Cornwall and Scilly. It is available as a printed book or as free pdf from the Environmental Records Centre for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly here.

BWARS member Steven Falk's much anticipated Field Guide to Bees of Great Britain and Ireland has been published.  This is the first extensive guide to all the British and Irish bee species since Edward Saunder's 1896 tome - The Hymenoptera Aculeata of the British Islands. The new field guide is 432 pages, with keys, species accounts and many photographs of nearly every species. In addition there are many illustrations by renowned insect illustrator Richard Lewington.