Dear All

In the spirit of exchanging experience through this forum...  I am after yours! 

'Bee banks' are often incorporated within habitat creation schemes with a general aim to artificially boost the habitat/topographical heterogeneity of a site and provide nesting and foraging resources for ground-nesting solitary bees and wasps through mimicking low cliffs and slopes (esp. south-facing), and providing bare ground and early-successional vegetation. However, there seems to be little published information on whether these structures actually deliver the desired results.

I am collating examples of where bee banks have been used on aggregates/minerals sites and would be interested in any monitoring data that is out there.  Please get in touch if you are aware of any reports or other relevant information.

Many thanks
Andrew

andrew.whitehouse@buglife.org.uk

Do you actually want to find examples of "deliberate" bee bank creation rather than "accidental" remnant faces/landslips etc?  On our sites it is usually a question of retaining existing features that can be seen to already have invert interest, without backfilling against them, rather than creating brand new.  Retention of sand faces more likely to be driven by sand martins rather than inverts anyway!

Andy D.

Hi Andy

Yes, we reccomend that retaining existing features such as sand cliffs and slopes is best practice.  However, for this specific piece of work I am interested in deliberate bee bank creation to add topographic interest to uniform sites and to create bare ground habitat where it is lacking.  The use of these goes beyond nest sites for mining bees and wasps - they can also provide useful habitat for thermophilic insects such as Dingy Skipper and Small Blue butterflies.

Sand martins can act as a useful flagship species for the retention of sand faces in both active and redundant quarries.  The mining bees and wasps which will also use the faces are essentially doing the same thing - just on a smaller scale!  However, by purely concentrating on the Sand Martins we could be missing a trick - ensuring that patches of wildflowers are able to develop in the vicinity will provide nectar, pollen and foraging resources for the bees and wasps and thus give a massive boost to the biodiversity potential of a site with minimum extra effort.

Further to my previous request, I am now looking for sites to try out some experimental bee banks (subject to funding) - if anyone out there manages or knows of a suitable site please get in touch. 

cheers

Andrew