UK Bee Species

Fabricius Nomad Bee (Nomada fabriciana)

Nomada fabriciana (Linnaeus, 1767) · subfamily Nomadinae · family Apidae

Here is a small oddity of scientific naming: this bee was named to honour Johan Christian Fabricius, but not by him. Linnaeus, Fabricius's own teacher, described the species in 1767 and chose the epithet fabriciana as a tribute to his brilliant Danish pupil, then in his twenties and already at work on the vast insect catalogues that would fill his life.^[3] Two and a half centuries later, a teacher's small gesture is still spoken aloud every time the bee is recorded.

The bee itself is a rust-orange, wasp-shaped cuckoo, only seven to ten millimetres long, hairless and long-legged: one of the earliest nomads on the wing each spring and one of the commonest in Britain. It builds no nest and gathers no pollen. Instead it slips into the burrow of a mining bee, lays an egg on the cell wall, and leaves its own larva to kill the host young and eat the pollen store left behind. See where it sits among Britain's bees on the UK Native Bee Species Map, or among the world's bees in the World Bee Atlas.

A bee that lives like a wasp

Nomad bees are cuckoo bees, cleptoparasites of the mining bees in the genus Andrena.^[4] A female Nomada has none of the pollen-carrying hairs of most other bees; she is hairless, wasp-shaped and shining, with a single job. She finds the burrow of her host species, slips inside while the owner is away, and lays her own egg on the wall of an unsealed cell.^[4] The genus name is Greek for "wanderer", after that habit of drifting low over the host's nesting ground rather than digging a home of her own.^[7] What happens next is where the wasp-like life gets its edge.

Two waves a year

In Britain the Fabricius nomad bee is bivoltine, running two generations a year to track its equally bivoltine host.^[6] Adults visit dandelions, buttercups and umbellifers for their own nectar, but never carry pollen home. Look for them not on flowers so much as on the ground, patrolling patches of bare, warm soil where the host's burrows are hidden.^[1]

Where and when you will see it

The Fabricius nomad bee is widespread through England and Wales, especially in the south, and thins out further north with only sporadic records from Scotland and Ireland.^[1] It turns up almost anywhere its host does, so nesting aggregations of Gwynne's mining bee on garden lawns, brownfield land, disturbed soil, chalk downland and open woodland are all good places to look.^[1] It is also present across much of Europe from Ireland to Turkey, and across the Palaearctic further east.^[6]

Telling it apart from other nomads

Britain has more than thirty species of Nomada, and many look alike; a firm identification is often a hand-lens job.^[2] The Fabricius nomad has three features that, taken together, no other British nomad shows:

The abdomen is mainly reddish, sometimes with narrow paler bands at the segment edges. A larger, chunkier nomad with all-yellow legs is more likely to be Gooden's nomad bee or Marsham's nomad bee.^[2]

Why a cuckoo bee is good news

Cuckoo bees can look, at first, like a drag on pollination: they gather no pollen, build no nests, and their presence means fewer host cells survive. In practice the story runs the other way. A cuckoo is only ever as abundant as its host, so a healthy nomad population is a signal that the mining-bee community beneath it is thriving.^[7] A lawn that supports a red-and-black nomad also supports the small brown mining bee it depends on, and the wider web of ground-nesting bees around them, which is why ecologists have proposed cuckoo bees as useful indicator species for the health of a whole bee community.^[8] See how the pieces of that web fit together in The Plate Without Bees.

Frequently asked questions

Related species