The late summer flying bees vary hugely in size, colour and shape, from the round, fluffy bumblebees to the medium-sized, striped plasterer bee, parasitic blood bee with a red abdomen, the mining bee with yellow legs and the pantaloon bee with massive pollen brushes on its hind legs .  And the tiny black Yellow-face bees and Small scissor bees are still around. You may also notice that some of the bumblebees just got a lot larger again, like the size they were in the spring. That’s because a new generations of queen bumblebees are flying. Many will have mated with males (yellow, fluffy faces) from nearby nests and are looking for somewhere safe to hunker down for the next few months until spring when they will emerge to create their own colony.

Tips for IDing August bumblebees:

•  Early bumblebees (Bombus pratorum) – so called because the colony produces new queen bees as early as May when other bumblebees colonies are still busy producing workers. This month a second generation of queens (13mm) could be flying along with smaller (10mm) workers and the pretty males, which have a more fluffy, yellow thorax. Don’t confuse these small males with the larger males of red-tailed bumblebees. The latter has a much bigger red bottom and is larger in size too.
• White-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lucorum) males – if you’re lucky you may see these bright yellow banded fluffy bumblebees flying now. They are easy to distinguish from queens and workers by their much yellower thorax. At the end of the summer bumblebee queens produce males and new queens who will leave the nest and mate.

You may also see Common carder bees,  Red-tailed bumblebees, Tree bumblebees and Garden bumblebees this month, but many fewer have so far been seen this year in most parts of the country than previous year. All the castes could be out – the large queens, and smaller workers and the yellow-face males. And a new generation of cuckoo bumblebees may also be flying, such as the Field cuckoo bee (Bombus campestris), which lays its eggs in carder bees’ nests. But if the host’s nest hasn’t done well this year, there will be a lack of cuckoo bees too. Here’s a full guide to cuckoos. ID tip: They have darker wings than nest-making bumblebees and no pollen baskets because their host’s worker bees collect the pollen to feed the cuckoo bees’ females and males.

How to ID August solitary bees:

• Blood bees (Sphecodes) can often be found where Furrow bees and some mining bees are nesting as they invade their nests.   There are several hundred species of these parasitic bees globally and around 17 in the British Isles. They range in size from 4mm to 8mm, but can be identified from other black, hairless bees by their red abdomen which looks as if it is full of blood. Telling one blood bee species from another can be very challenging, despite possessing some of the best descriptive common names such as swollen-thighed, bare-saddled and dull-headed. If you see one on heathland or coastal dunes, chances are it could be the Sandpit blood bee (Sphecodes pellucidus) . They are cleptoparasites, which means the female enters a host’s nest, opens up a cell and destroys the egg, or larvae, and replaces it with her own egg before resealing it. Females are usually found around the nests of the host, while males often hang out on a variety of daisy-like flowers and umbellifers. Tip: Don’t kill these bees to save the furrow and mining bees. Nature works in mysterious ways and we must respect that.
• Small scissor bees (Chelostoma campanularum) – despite being the UK’s smaller bee they were easy to spot in June and July despite their diminutive size, because the 4.5mm-long males shelter in the middle of bellflowers (Campanula in Latin) during dull weather and/or at night. Now most of the bellflowers have gone, look in Hardy geraniums like Geranium Rozanne instead. A cavity nesting bee, they use small pre-existing holes in dead wood including fence posts and plug the holes with small particles including sand grains and grit, like Resin bees.  
• Yellow-face bees (Hylaeus) are one of many small, (5mm) predominately black bees which frequents gardens from mid to late summer. Yellow-face bees have tiny yellow spots (female) or a triangle (male) on their face, and yellow on their legs. They nest in a variety of small cavities including hollow stems and manmade bee hotels and summer units if the dimensions are small enough. They line the cells of their nest with waterproof, anti-fungal resin applied with their tongue, which explains why Yellow-face bees are classified in the same family as Plasterer bees (Colletes).  You won’t see pollen on their hind legs or under their tummy, because, unusually for a bee, they carry pollen back to the nest in a special stomach, called a crop and regurgitate it to make a semi-liquid mixed with nectar to feed their brood (larvae).
• Yellow-legged mining bee (Andrena flavipes) – are bivoltine, which means they have two generations a year. The first appears in spring and flies from March to June, and a second one from June to September, so you are seeing the second generation now. They are common in southern England and could be mistaken for honeybees, but are a bit smaller and a bit hairier and have pollen brushes (scopa) on their back legs to collect pollen, rather than scraping blobs of pollen into pollen baskets which honeybees do. They nest in large aggregations in south-facing slopes and short turf including mown lawns.
• Four-banded flower bee (Anthophora quadrimaculata) – these small zippy banded bees with big eyes (the males are green-eyed) are fading to grey now. Look out for them darting rapidly between flowers on catmints, lavenders, Black horehound and dead-nettles, emitting a high-pitched buzz. You have most chance of spotting this bee in Greater London and the Thames Gateway than anywhere else in the UK.
• Pantaloon bee (Dasypoda hirtipes) is a medium-sized fluffy bee easily identified by the female’s oversized orange pollen brushes, or ‘pantaloons’ on its hind legs, and its nesting behaviour. It excavates a burrow in sandy banks, coastal footpaths, and even on brownfield sites and leaves a large fan of sandy spoil to one side of the hole. Most likely to be seen in heathland and coastal sand dunes of south east England, Dorset, Norfolk and Wales. It’s one of my favourite holiday pastimes, trying to spot the spoil and then waiting to see the bee in action.
• Davies’ plasterer bee (Colletes daviesanus) is half the size of a honeybee with a furry thorax and a shiny abdomen with grey-white stripes. There are 500 known species of plasterers – also called Colletes bees –  worldwide, but only nine in Britain. This is the main one you’ll see in your garden on any daisy-like flower and nesting in weathered sandstone walls, soft mortar or in south-facing slopes of bare soil in large aggregations with other bees of the same species.  They are called plasterer bees because they plaster the cells of the nests with a cellophane-like resin substance they produce which is both waterproof and fungus-resistant.

You may also still see leafcutter bees and small, black furrow bees foraging in parks and gardens throughout the UK at this time of year.

How to help bees in August:

1. Plant different flowers for different bees. Hollyhocks, sunflowers, globe thistles and cardoons are all magnets at this time of year for short-tongued bees, along with open-faced dahlias. For the long-tongued bumblebees, Black horehound, Salvias, Germanders (Tuecrium) and buddleia are still flowering. And Geranium rozanne and Calamint are still going strong. Common sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) is starting to produce coppery blooms which are a top attraction for solitary bees according to Rosybee nursery’s fantastically helpful research . Marjoram (Origanum), Anise hyssop, thyme and Bergamot, are all later-flowering herbs that do well in pots in a sunny position.
2. If you only have a window box, Mexican fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus), creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum), trailing nasturtium and Bird’s-foot trefoil are still flowering. Add sedum for late flowers and annuals such as cosmos and snap dragons.
3. If you let your lawn grow into a wildflower meadow this year, now is a good time to do what’s called the ‘haycut’. Cut to 4cm with a mower, or better still use a scythe or shears. Leave the cuttings for a few days to let seeds drop to the surface of the soil, then rake the cuttings up to reduce soil fertility and encourage more wildflowers next year.
4. Gather seeds from plants such as poppies, love-in-a-mist, bellflowers and foxgloves. Store them in labelled paper bags in a cool, dry place for sowing or scattering next spring. Or, just scatter them around your garden now and hope for the best.
5. Leave parts of the garden undisturbed, as ground nesting bumblebee queens may be looking for a snug place to spend the winter.
6. Ditch the weed killers and pesticides. 
7.  You can put up bee hotels now, but you probably won’t get any visitors until next spring. If you want to see what is happening inside a bee hotel, you could invest in an observation box with a Perspex viewing window. But again, wait until next spring to put it up.
8. It’s still not too late to drill holes in blocks of wood – 10mm, 8mm, 6mm and 4mm diameters and up to 30 cm deep (although some bees only need a depth of a few centimetres to nest in) – and screw them to a sturdy support. Drill tiny holes in existing structures such as fence posts, or dead trees. Small scissor bees, yellow-face bees or resin bees may take up residence.
9. Create a bank of sand mixed with some clay soil against a south facing wall for mining bees which like to burrow into sand. Create steps in the sand as some bees like to nest vertically and others horizontally. The clay will help the bank to keeps its shape after the bees have tunnelled into it. You may find Ivy bees (Colletes hederae) nesting in it next month.
10. Provide a source of water for thirsty honeybees. This can be a shallow bowl or saucer with stones or pebbles in that the bees can stand on while they are drinking. Bees can’t swim!

Urban Bees was asked by King’s College London to come up with recommendations for improving biodiversity across its campuses. After visiting each campus, we suggested places where bee hotels and bee observation boxes could be installed for cavity-nesting wild solitary bees.

In early May 2024, we installed some 20 bee hotels across campus gardens, the grounds of residential apartments and at the back of a sports ground. And six bee observation boxes for education purposes.

What is a bee hotel?

It’s a wooden nesting box for cavity-nesting solitary bees designed to keep the rain out, which is packed with about 20 x 15cm long bamboo tubes 6mm – 8mm diameter wide. It is positioned at least a metre off the ground in a warm spot.

What is bee observation box?

It is a larger wooden nesting box designed to enable you to see the nesting habits of some wild, solitary bees through a Perspex cover. Its removable ‘window’ panels allows you to observe the action without moving the inner two-sided, slide-out wood cartridge which has channels to create ‘tunnels’.

Which bees could I see?

The most likely inhabitants are Red Mason Bee, (Osmia bicornis) which build their nests from late April to the end of June. Later in summer, Willughby’s Leafcutter Bee, (Megachile willughbiella), or the Patchwork Leafcutter Bee, (Megachile centuncularis) may nest. These bees are excellent pollinators and docile. They don’t sting. They nest alone, but often next door to each other, so one bee may check in to three tubes and lay 10 eggs in each, and other few bee do the same.

What might I observe?

Mason bees build mud walls along their particular ‘tunnel’, creating cells in which larvae develop.

Mated females will load up the hairs on their abdomen with as much pollen as they can – often seeming bright yellow in the process. They crawl to the end of their chosen tunnel and create a neat ball of pollen, on which they will lay their egg (see photo above). Then they will fly backwards and forwards holding mud balls and ‘brick up’ that cell.

They will continue this exhausting work, filling each cell and building a mud wall between each until the tunnel is full of perhaps nine or ten cells (see photo above) The eggs containing males are laid right at the front of the tunnel and females at the back.

Then they will plug the front of the tunnel with mud, so you can see that it is being used.

Life cycle Over the next few months the larvae will hatch and slowly eat the pollen: by September each will form a brown cocoon. This is how they will overwinter.

In March or April, depending on temperatures, males will hatch first. It’s amazing to watch the bees bite their way out through the hard mud walls, the outermost bees first (see photo above).

The males go to collect nectar from nearby flowers to build up their energy for mating and hang around the box waiting for the females to emerge.

Leafcutter bees have a similar approach, but use pieces of leaf instead of mud.  Females will find tough leaves – roses are favourites – and bite away a neat circle of the leaf.

They then fly backwards and forwards carrying the leaf discs in their front legs (see photo above) and stuff each one – with some effort – down the tunnel. Using their saliva, they overlap and stick the discs together, making a cylinder about the size and shape of a cigarette butt.

Into this they create a pollen ball, lay an egg on it, then seal the ‘butt’ with another few layers of leaf discs. This process repeats until the tunnel is full of egg-filled cylinders, then the front is plugged with layers of chewed leaves.

The following year, new bees will chew their way out of their containers and the cycle will start again.

We have designed our own Urban Bees flat-pack Bee Hotels.

Our bee observation boxes are supplied by Bee Equipment. More information here.

Mining bees

Of the 250 wild solitary bee species in the UK, many nest in tunnels in the ground and are mining bees. While we were doing the install at Great Dover Street Apartments we noticed a small hole in the soil below our feet and a bee flying low around it. On closer inspection we discovered that it was a Grey-patched mining bee (Andrena nitida) making her nest in the lose, bare soil. It reminded us that it’s important to have bare patches of soil where mining bees can burrow into the ground and lay their eggs.

We didn’t get any good photos, but here is one of the Grey-patched mining bee by Penny Metal.

Feeding the bees

Wild bees need nesting sites and nectar and pollen-rich flowers.

Now we are going to be working with the gardeners across all the campuses and residential settings to greatly improve the forage for solitary bees throughout the year. Without the nectar and pollen-rich flowers in early spring to late summer, the solitary bees won’t forage and they won’t use the nesting sites.

We are also embarking on a series of educational event to introduce students and staff to the bees and how to help them. The first one is a walkabout on Guy’s campus on 28 May. Details are here

Pictured above are two bumblebee species you’re likely to see this month: Early and Red-tailed bumblebees. (In addition you may also see buff-tailed bumblebees which have been flying all year in some southern parts of the UK, Common carder bees (Bombus pascuorum) and Tree bumblebees, which are all starting to emerge).

How to ID them:

• The Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) is smaller than other bumblebee species (up to 13mm) and prettier with her fluffy yellow collar and her noticeable orangey bottom. As her English name suggests, this is a spring specialist. The queens started to appear last month, followed by the female workers, and this month you may see both males and female workers. You can tell them apart because the males have much more yellow facial hair, like the one above.
• The huge, 22mm Red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) queens are one of our biggest bumblebees and without doubt one of the most striking with here black body and fiery red bottom. Although widespread, I’ve not seen one for a long time. The books say she is partial to blossom of sallow (willow) and prunus (cherries and plum) trees. I find the smaller, yellow-faced males are easier to see later in the summer.

Queen bumblebees may have nested (most underground in old rodent holes, under paving slabs, garden sheds, or even in compost bins) by now and laid their eggs, and some, like the Early bumblebee, may even have produced worker bees who are out collecting nectar and pollen to take home to their queen and her developing colony. Now is a crucial month to help them collect sufficient pollen to feed the larvae in the nest that will develop into new workers. We can do help best by planting pollen-rich spring flowers.

How to help them:

1. Leave a patch of the garden wild for nesting sites and don’t disturb a nesting site if you find one (it will only last until the end of the summer).
2. Put up a blue tit box for the tree bumblebee to nest in after the chicks have fledged.
3. Plant dead-nettles, clover, forget- me-nots, rosemary, wallflowers and more to provide food this month for the short-tongued and long-tongued bumblebees.
4. Sow seeds inside now to create more flowers later in the summer. Sweet peas, sunflowers, cosmos and Anise hyssop are some of the easiest to grow. Try growing on a heated mat until the seeds germinate.
5. Don’t mow the lawn (let clovers and dandelions flower) and ditch the weed killers and pesticides.
6. It’s still cold in the mornings or at night, or when the sun goes in, so bumblebees can get chilled and easily exhausted. The best way to help is to put them on a flower, or as a last resort a teaspoon of sugar, water solution. But they can rest for 45 minutes. So give them time. But please don’t feed them honey, it harbours bacteria that is bad for them.

These are the six most common solitary bee species this month: ,  Tawny mining bee, Buffish mining bee, Red mason bee, Orange-tailed mining bee (female pictured), Gooden’s nomad, Hawthorn mining bee, and Hairy-footed flower bees (female pictured),

How to ID them:

• The Tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva ) is easy to spot as she burrows up through lawns, her foxy-coloured coat strikingly visible against the green grass. And she leaves a tiny volcano-looking mound of soil in her wake. Like all mining bees, many will emerge from the same burrow or next door burrows in large aggregations.
• The Buffish mining bee (Andrena nigroaenea) is around 10mm -13mm with a dense brown pile on the top of its thorax (just below it’s head) a bit like a mane. Look at the flowers on blossoming trees and shrubs such as fruit trees, willows, and blackthorn, and wildflowers like dandelions, hawk’s-beards, buttercups and spurges. If you see a bee that at first you may think is a honeybee, take a closer look. If it is a smaller. slimmer and browner, chances are it’s one of the many brown mining bees out at this time, of which the Buffish is one of the most common, along with Gwynne’s (Andrena bicolor) and the Short-fringed (Andrena dorsata) mining bee. Don’t worry if you can’t ID them, the fact that you are looking closely is good. The latter two have two generations in one season, so if you don’t spot them in the spring, you may see the next lot in late summer instead.
• Red mason bees are checking out of bee hotels now by chewing through the mud-plugged tubes. They are a little smaller (7-10mm) than a honey bee (9-10mm), more gingery and have a rounder bottom. The males appear a couple of weeks before the females and congregate around the bee hotels waiting to pounce when the females emerge. The best way to tell a male from a female is that he has white whisker-like hair on his face and longer antennae and is a bit slimmer.
• Orange-tailed mining bee (Andrena haemorrhoa) females have now emerged after the smaller, drabber males. The 11-13mm females should be easier to spot because of the neat brick-red pile on their thorax. They do have a tiny orange tip on their bottom. Try looking for them foraging on tree fruits, dandelions and spurge. They will fly until July so don’t give up if you don’t see them this month. Like all mining bees, they burrow into the ground to nest, and they collect pollen on their hairs on their hind legs.
• Gooden’s nomad bee (Nomada goodenianna) looks more like a common wasp, than a bee but it’s a cleptoparasite, or cuckoo bee. There are 34 Nomada species in the UK (850 worldwide), and this is one of the most common. She is much easier to ID than the small, brown mining bees which are her host. So if you see her, you know that the mining bees in the underground nest she is hovering around are either Grey-patched (Andrena nitida) or Buffish mining bees(Andrena nigroaenea). So if you see lots of Gooden’s nomad bees, it means that the host bees, whose home they break into and lay their eggs, are alive and healthy. (Worldwide, a quarter of the 20,000 recorded bee species are cuckoos).
• Hawthorn mining bee (Andrena chrysosceles) is another small (9-11mm), cute brown mining bee not easily distinguishable from many others! It has orangey coloured hind legs, a shiny blackish, striped abdomen and a brown, hairy thorax, Despite its common name, it feeds on a lot more than hawthorn blossom – dandelions, blackthorn, buttercups and spring-flowering shrubs.
• Hairy-footed flower bees (Anthophora plumipes) are often mistaken for bumblebees because of their round, fluffy appearance, but they live alone (not in colonies). At this time of year gangs of brown-coloured males are clearly visible chasing the more striking black females among the lungwort (pulmonaria), wallflowers and alkanet with their long, straw-like tongues (proboscis) outstretched. It is mating season.

TIP How do you to tell a Gooden’s and a wasp apart? Gooden’s are usually flying low looking for the nest of a mining bee or even walking around on the ground. And they won’t bother you.

How to help solitary bees:

1. Plant lungwort, wallflowers, comfrey and flowering currants for long-tongued Hairy footed flower bees. Flowering fruit trees, willows, spurges, alkanet and forget-me-nots for mining bees and Red mason bees.
2. Leave old mortar untouched as Hairy-footed flower bees may be nesting here. Or make some cob bricks that they can nest in instead.
3. Install bee-hotels in a warm location at least a metre off the ground, ideally facing south, where Red mason bees can check-in and lay their eggs this month and next. We’ve made our own bee hotels that we fill with either cardboard tubes or bamboo. The cardboard tubes can be removed in the winter and put in a cool, dry shed to protect them from the elements and the bee hotel can be cleaned and new tubes installed.
4. Leave a patch of loose, bare earth for mining bees to burrow and where Red mason bees can collect soil to plug their nests.
5. Create a bank of sand or a mound of sand in a sunny spot for mining bees to nest in.
6. Let dandelions and alkanet grow – they are very important early bee food. Research shows there is a hungry gap for bee in March-April, so these good sources of nectar and pollen are more vital than ever.

For information on the honey bee (Apis mellifera) and the bee-fly (Bombylius major) see Bees to See in March blog here.