The Shrill Carder Bee (Bombus sylvarum) In 1912 Frederick Sladen, in his delightful book, The Humble Bee, describes the shrill carder bee as “widely distributed in England and Ireland and common in a good many places but… rare in Scotland.” He doesn’t mention Wales. In 1932 in a fabulous little pocket book on bees, wasps and ants, […]
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And so to the sharks that enter the waters of the British Isles… Whilst most spend their time well offshore and are rare or irregular visitors, it excites me that there are more than 30 shark species who live or venture into our waters. The Great British Sharks! In popular culture, worldwide, shark diversity tends
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Are we surrounded by sharks? Sharks in our consciousness If you live inland and especially in the British Isles, you probably have little reason to think about sharks. That doesn’t mean you don’t think about them, just that you don’t have to. I read a statistic from the 1980s saying that, at any one time, there
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What we have discovered about scarlet malachite beetles and the consequences for the conservation of the species We’ve had the pleasure of working on the scarlet malachite beetle conservation project for many years. Their species is in decline in the UK. We’re attempting to reduce that decline. Here are some of our findings. Thatch Courtship
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Spider Face Off So how did an obsession with spider faces begin? When I was 14, my arachnophobic Mum came home from work one late October evening and handed me (the arachnophilic little monster she’d created) a book that she’d spotted in the library. Hallowe’en was approaching, we shared a love of it. Perhaps she
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Celebrating Nature The weekend before last we were lucky enough to have a stall at the National Botanical Garden of Wales, as part of the Celebrate Nature event organised by the For the Love of Nature team – what a fabulous bunch of people. It was an amazing event supporting mental health charities, bringing together
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The Joy of Bees Honey bee swarms can occur anytime from mid-spring, through the summer. From my experience, they peak in July and quickly reduce as the month fades, with August swarms quite rare. I’ve always been fascinated by bees and started beekeeping when I was 16. My mentor was my first boss and he
Porpoisfully looking at Dol-Fins When we’re lucky enough to see dolphins (or unidentified cetaceans), it’s not always easy to tell which species they are. Sometimes they leap clear or poke their heads out of the water but, more often than not, all we see is a dorsal fin and a bit of back with no
A Study in Scarlet Introduction – Breakthroughs We had some breakthroughs in 2021 and 22. Slowly but surely through managing and monitoring our little scarlet malachite beetle nursery cottages, we accumulated enough confidence to have another go at captive breeding, really just to find out what the larvae (beetle grubs) eat. Are they specialists on
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It’s all about the Ladybird Spider for us at the moment. Last month we conducted another ladybird spider translocation on the Dorset heaths. Today we launch our newest book, Lacey the Ladybird Spider along with our Ladybird spider T-Shirts. This Easter, our ladybird spiders will be on CBBC’s Deadly Predators starring Steve Backshall… he gave
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