I approach this book as someone who doesn’t know much at all about bees, solitary or otherwise, and would like to learn more. Does this book work for me? Very much so.
As we would expect from a New Naturalist, this book is written by palpable experts and as we would hope, in this volume these experts get their messages and information across very well. I am now better equipped to understand much more about the lives of the bees that visit my garden, and with this book on my shelves I will always be able to get a handy recap when needed.
I was particularly keen to understand more about the Ivy Bee which visits the Ivy on my garden shed and my garden fences in late summer. I found out a lot about this relatively newly arrived species so my interest will be enhanced, not reduced, next autumn when, on warm sunny days, when the slightly unpleasant aroma of Ivy flowers is heavy in the air, the Ivy Bees are the most obvious insect life as I sit looking up for birds. Even now I wonder where the bees nest, it can’t be very far away, but the description of their nesting sites doesn’t seem to fit anything of which I am aware very close by. Hmmm!
My ignorance of bees doesn’t end with Ivy Bees – it is pretty much absolute across species – and so I learned a lot from these 600 pages of text and illustrations. The illustrations, many photographs of stripy insects, but a good range of habitat photographs, graphs, maps and a few tables and line drawings are of good quality. I mention that because I have criticised those aspects of some fairly recent New Naturalist volumes – things seem to have improved considerably.
The cover? I didn’t immediately ‘see’ it, but now I do. I’d give it 6/10.
Solitary Bees by Ted Benton and Nick Owens is published by Harper Collins.
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