Everybody loves bees. But actually, nobody cares much about bees. This is the ironic undertone to this book. The bees that everyone loves are honey bees. Except that many people think bumblebees make honey. From the packaging, this also appears to include many people responsible for making and marketing the honey. Or people just like bumbles because they are cute and fluffy and friendly looking. But wait. What? There are other bees? How many? What madness is this?
So, Benton and Owens are starting from well behind when it comes to getting their enlightening message across to a general audience. They will not be daunted though. This is a big book, nearly 600 pages, and it is packed full of detail and information. There is no identification guide as such, but each genus is discussed to put into context just how diverse is even the impoverished British fauna of solitary bees. There follows an outpouring of ecological study on all aspects of solitary bee biology — how mating and foraging strategies develop, how sociality is far from being the single bee that the term solitary implies, how these prime directives for life and survival are usurped by predators and parasites, how they are conflicted by climate change, and how humans have, mostly unknowingly but still significantly, impacted solitary bees.
I like bees, nearly as much as I like wasps. But if I thought wasps were unfairly maligned, I certainly take my hat off and acknowledge that solitary bees have been sorely underestimated, almost to the point of wilful ignorance. This book does what the New Naturalist Library does so well, it puts a concentrated focus on a narrow subject that might not otherwise occur to the broader reader, and it leads you by the hand, right into the heart of the labyrinth, flashing the light of the torch onto all the obscure and arcane hieroglyphs etched into the walls, that would otherwise be skirted past in the dark.
Such is the scope of entomology that it is certainly possible, after a lifetime of engrossed study, still to find new things to amaze and wonder at. In my house this is usually demonstrated by me looking up to see all my family looking at me, and I then realise that I must have said “Wow!” out loud. Again. It happened several times whilst reading this book. I am now enthused. I need to look more closely at males of Andrena chrysosceles to see how the stylopised ones have reduced pale facial patches; or the females have abnormally gained them. I must pay greater attention to the kinked pollen-collecting facial hairs of Osmia and Anthophora. And I really need to get on my hands and knees to check out the intermediate social structures of Halictus and Lasioglossum nest aggregations. I did eventually find the ‘newly arrived’ ivy bee, Colletes hederae in south-east London, though not yet in my heavy clay garden. My next challenges are to find two things I’ve still not seen in the field — a male stylops and oil beetle triungulins. Wish me luck.
