Stuart Roberts has added a a new map  showing the results of the 2014 monitoring project for Bombus hypnorum. This includes 3,290 lines of data. 224 new dots have been added to the map in 2014, which represents a more than a 20% increase over 2013.

A number of excellent videos showing behavioural aspects of various aculeates have been added to the species accounts.

Many thanks to John Walters and Vivian Russell for providing the video sequences.

The new video sequences can be viewed on the following pages:

Anthidium manicatum

Eumenes coarctatus

Mellinus arvensis

Species accounts for a further 59 species have been added to this website. These are the accounts published in Part 8 of the Provisional atlas of aculeate Hymenoptera of Britain and Ireland.

Species added are listed on the right.

Links to all the species accounts are here: https://www.bwars.com/index.php?q=species_list

BWARS members Nigel Jones and Ian Cheeseborough collaborated on a 13 year project to discover and map the aculeates of Shropshire. The results are summarised in a new publication A provisional atlas of the bees, wasps and ants of Shropshire

Kent Field Club have published the Bumblebees of Kent by Nikki Gammans and Geoff Allan.  The 170 pages include more than 80 colour photographs and updated distribution maps and species profiles of the bumblebees of Kent.  This book aims to provide a comprehensive guide to bumblebee ecology and offers an inclusive introduction to their identification.  It discusses the importance of bumblebees, their decline and how we can help reverse this.

An Identification workshop will be held at Dinton Pastures

Details:

An introduction to the Hymenoptera aculeata

BWARS President, Michael Archer's key to Vespoid wasps has been published by the Royal Entomological Society. This new work contains a well illustrated key, detailed species accounts and colour images of many species.

Details for the AGM weekend programme have been published here

Andrena vaga, a widespread black and greyish-white mining bee in continental Europe, has recently been found at two locations on the south coast of England - at Dungeness, Kent and Brownwich Cliff, Hampshire. This species could easily be overlooked as it is similar to the widespread A. cineraria, (especially the males) so do be on the look out for this striking Andrena bee in the coming weeks, particularly in southern England.

The South West Bees Report researched 23 species considered to be at risk in the UK, twenty are declining whilst three have become extinct.