White dead nettle

Hello everyone,

Today we planted out white dead nettle at Little Cheyne Court wind farm. This is a favourite forage plant of long tongue bumblebees and provides both pollen and nectar. It flowers before many other spring and summer plants and its one of the first plants the short-haired bumblebee will forage on. There are many good clumps of white dead nettle across Romney Marsh and small amounts in Dungeness. We plan to keep replanting areas with white dead nettle as this will be a benefit to many rare bumblebee species. The white dead nettle was kindly given to us by farmer Neil Anderson of Kingsdown farm.

We also planted out 9 musk mallow plants donated to us by farmer David Harrison of Little Omenden Farm. Again the mallows are a great forage source for our bumblebees!

Until next time......................

Sweden 2013 collection trip

The project is pleased to announce we will be returning to Sweden at the end of the month to continue our collection of emerging short-haired bumblebee queens for reintroduction to the UK. This is part of on-going reintroductions to establish a self sustainable and viable population in the UK. The project officer with three volunteers will be travelling to Skane to look for flowering of the queens favourite forage plants such as white dead nettle. Once the queens begin to emerge six other volunteers will join us in Skane to collect up to 100 queens to bring back to the UK to begin their two weeks quarantine. The healthy queens will then be released at RPSB Dungeness. 

Brave bees

Hello everyone

One of our project supporters Survival Arts is running an art competition to celebrate the return of the short-haired bumblebee called "brave bees". Follow the link below to see what exciting work they are doing

http://www.survival-arts.org/brave-bees/

What's been happening

Hello everyone

Its been a bit of time since I last wrote so here is an update of everything the project has been up to. 

We are busy planning for our 2013 Swedish expedition. This years volunteers who will be coming to Sweden took a trip to the Natural History Museum to view specimens of the short-haired bumblebee. We also looked at species which could potentially be confused with the short-haired bumblebee. 

I also held an identification day for persons who are at intermediate level at RSPB Dungeness. Unfortunately the weather was not so good so we stayed inside the classroom and looked at specimens and discussed key identification of all bumblebee species.  Geoff Allen also took part of the day explaining the lifecycle and ecology of solitary bees. 

I have also been very busy with our new website! This should be coming very soon. All the text is written and the design and templates are in place. So just going through the final checks and it should be up and running by the end of the month! Our new logo is also complete which was designed by Simon Daverin (my brother-in-law). 

At last spring is finally here and I am now busy planning for this years queen collection

Until next time................

Natural History Museum

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had an excellent Christmas and enjoyed your new year celebrations!

On the 15th January I will be giving a talk at The Natural History Museum about the reintroduction. Its a free event from 14:30-15:00. I will be showing lots of photographs of our project and discussing all aspects of our work. It should be a great event and there's time to explore the museum in the morning! 

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/events/programs/naturelive/plight_of_the_bumblebee.html?date=05.01.2013

I am also currently working on the creation of our project website which will be www.subt.org.uk we hope this will be up and running by the end of March ready for our next Swedish trip! I am also busy planning our 2013 Swedish trip to collect emerging queens for our next reintroduction. 

The project will also be attending large events such as the South of England show and the Kent county show. We also have planned many bumblebee ID events which I will be posting the details up soon. 

Until next time

Nikki

Quiz fundraiser 2012

Hello everyone

We had a wonderful time on Sunday with our annual quiz fundraiser! We had 11 teams of 5-6 and raised over £532.18 for the project. This money will go towards creating our own project website. I am also pleased to announce that we received £340 from Waitrose Community Matters scheme which ran in August, this money has been used to purchase wild flower seeds across the release site. I will now be applying to the Asda token scheme to again raise money for the project and creation of wild flower habitat. 

Over this coming month I will be giving a couple of talks to local community groups, planning two more bumblebee identification days with Kent Wildlife Trust for next July (do contact them if you are interested), planning our 2013 Swedish trip and helping create our website. I will keep you all up to date on our progress.

Until next time....

Inside out and Sevenoaks talk

Hello everyone

This coming Monday the project will feature on BBC 1 programme 'Inside Out- SouthEast' at 19:30. I will be discussing bee declines  and how important the Wildlife Trust Living Landscapes scheme is for conservation. Might be just a quick snip but worth a watch.

Nest Tuesday I will be giving a talk at Sevenoaks Community Centre Bat and Ball from 8pm about bees. This has been organised by the local Friends of The Earth group who are currently supporting bees as one of their projects. 

http://i.imgur.com/AUsJY.png

I am currently writing our six month report of this summers work which will be posted on our partners Hymettus web page. Nest Sunday we will have the annual quiz to raise funds for the project. We are currently raising funds to create our own website for the project!

Until next time