영국의 벌 종류

Short-fringed Mining Bee (Andrena dorsata)

Andrena dorsata (Kirby, 1802) · subgenus Simandrena · family Andrenidae

How to identify a short-fringed mining bee

The short-fringed mining bee is a medium 안드레나, roughly 9 to 10 mm long, and at its best it is a smart-looking bee. A freshly emerged female has warm foxy-brown hairs across the thorax and a shining dark abdomen crossed by thin bands of white hair along the rear edge of the segments, the bands often broken in the middle on the front of the abdomen.^[1][4] Males are slimmer and plainer, and like many spring bees they fade quickly with wear, so worn individuals lose much of their colour.^[1]

The feature that gives the bee both its English name and its surest identification is on the female's hind leg. The hind tibia is broad and widens noticeably towards its tip, and it carries only a very short fringe of hairs on its upper edge, in place of the longer pollen-carrying fringe seen on close relatives.^[2][4] Combined with the largely bare, shining abdomen, that short-fringed, club-shaped hind leg is the diagnostic the field guides return to.^[2]

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Several medium brown mining bees can be confused with it, and a hand-lens view of the female's hind leg usually settles them. The closely related species in the ovatula group, such as 안드레나 오바투라, 안드레나 윌켈라 그리고 Andrena similis, have the hind tibia orange rather than dark, slimmer, and with a longer upper fringe.^[2] Andrena congruens is superficially similar but again has a slimmer hind tibia and a much longer fringe, and the very rare Andrena lepida needs specialist separation.^[2] In males, the dark hind tibiae and the long hind tarsi, about one and a half times the length of the tibia, are useful pointers.^[2]

Two generations in a single year

Unlike the many British mining bees that fly for only a few weeks each spring, the short-fringed mining bee is bivoltine, raising two broods a year.^[2][3] The spring generation is on the wing from March to May and feeds heavily on spring-blossoming shrubs and early umbellifers. The summer generation flies from July to September and favours brambles, summer umbellifers, thistles and ragworts.^[2] The result is a bee that can be met across most of the warmer half of the year, a long season that makes it a steady garden and hedgerow visitor.

From scarce to common: a range on the move

The short-fringed mining bee is one of British entomology's quiet success stories. When recorders first took a close interest in the solitary bees in the 1970s it was a fairly scarce insect, but it has since become one of the commonest mining bees across the southern half of England.^[1] It has expanded markedly through central England in recent decades and continues to spread north, with records reaching Anglesey and Lincolnshire.^[2] It is absent from Ireland but present on several of the Channel Islands, and it is widely distributed across southern and central Europe.^[1][3] National recording schemes do not regard it as scarce or threatened, and it carries no special habitat restrictions.^[1][5]

Where it nests and what follows it

Like all mining bees, the short-fringed mining bee is solitary: each female digs and provisions her own burrow in the ground, with no queen and no worker caste.^[3] It nests in bare or sparsely vegetated soil and is a broad generalist, or polylectic, taking pollen and nectar from a wide range of flowers across its long season rather than specialising on one plant.^[2] That flexibility is a large part of why it has prospered where fussier bees have declined.

Where a host bee thrives, its cuckoo usually follows. The short-fringed mining bee is the chief host of the variable nomad bee (노마다 조나타), a wasp-like cuckoo bee and recent arrival in Britain that has spread in step with its host.^[2] Nomad bees build no nest of their own; the female slips into the host's burrow and lays in a provisioned cell, where her larva destroys the host egg and eats the stored food.^[6] A patrol of these slim black-and-yellow cuckoos flying low over bare ground is often the first sign that a mining bee colony is near. You can meet more of these brood parasites in our guide to the 그림 속의 유목민 벌.

Why the short-fringed mining bee matters

An unshowy, common bee can still be quietly important. Because it raises two generations, the short-fringed mining bee pollinates both the spring blossom of shrubs and orchards and the summer flowers of brambles, thistles and umbellifers, bridging a gap that single-brooded bees cannot.^[2] Its generalist diet makes it a dependable visitor to gardens, allotments and hedgerows, and its nesting banks support the cuckoo bees and other associates that depend on them. Keeping patches of open, sunny, sparsely vegetated ground, and the blossom and wildflowers it feeds on, helps this adaptable native and the small web of life around it.

Bees like this turn blossom and wildflower into the nectar that becomes raw honey. Explore our full range of single-origin raw honeys in the HoneyBee & Co. 매장.

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Raw honey from Midlands meadows and hedgerows, the same bramble and wildflower a short-fringed mining bee forages in summer. Our British honey supplier holds SALSA Certification. 280g. £10.99.

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HoneyBee & Co.는 6대에 걸쳐 이어져 온 가족의 양봉 전통을 바탕으로, 니스토르(Nistor) 가문의 양봉장과 엄선된 영국 생산자들로부터 공급받은 꿀을 사용합니다. 당사의 영국산 꿀 공급업체는 SALSA 인증을 보유하고 있으며, 15% NHS 할인을 제공합니다. 모든 병은 가공되지 않은 생꿀로, 여과 과정을 거치지 않았으며, 어느 벌통에서 생산되었는지 추적할 수 있습니다.