Bee hotel update and more Wasp Spiders

Bee activity has slowed down in the bee hotel but there are still a few bees preparing their nest chambers. Some bees like below, have closed the chamber with a strange saliva like substance that looks like bubbly plastic!

With all these pictures, it is much better to click on them to see them much sharper and clearer, not to mention larger.

Below were the first six nests of my yellow and black bee that I mentioned in a previous post - well I have now discovered that it is a Wool Carder Bee (Anthidium species), who don’t use leaves or mud to line their nests, but plant hairs! I don't have any obvious furry leaved plants but there is furry stuff on the spent flowers/seed pods of Perovskia, so it might have come from that. If you look at the two pictures below, you'll see one chamber in preparation, lined with cotton wool like stuff. The other five chambers below have been sealed off; I'm guessing from the colours that four are with some kind of chewed up plant material and the brown one with chewed woody stuff or soil.

This bee eventually made nine nest chambers! She was one busy bee. 😀 I have also seen one again in my herb bed, displaying a rather strange behaviour of buzzing and hovering around a couple of my herbs that are in bloom, occasionally stopping on a flower for a nano second only to buzz off again and continue this strange patrolling. The males of Anthidium manicatum display territorial behaviour,  patrolling around their favoured plants and chasing off other pollinators, whilst waiting for females to appear, so it's possible other Anthidium bees do the same. I have no idea how long their nesting season goes on for, so cross fingers there may be more nests in the bee hotel from this species!

There are 11 species of Anthidium in France whilst only A. manicatum in the UK, so I can't be sure which exact species is my bee, though I don't believe they all collect plant hairs. I really don't have the time right now to research this further.

Other solitary bees have chosen the cut pieces of bamboo for their nest chambers, although what has struck me since these chambers were sealed off, is that some of them have been broken into. I know there are parasitic wasps, and also other bees who lay their eggs in the nest chambers of other bees (they are known as Cuckoo Bees), but what has surprised me is that they haven't resealed the chamber. It's not just this one below (top right bamboo), but other different sized holes from other bees have also shown this breaking in....

.... like these tiny holes here - some on the bottom row have been broken into.

So you can see, so much to study and research and keep me occupied! It's all so fascinating and I look forward to seeing a whole year in the life of my bee hotel next year. And I must remember to take my camera out more often and take photos of the bees!

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Now back to my Wasp Spiders. Below is a young one.

And this is a freshly made web (when the spider wasn't around). The zigzag stabilimentum is quite clear here with a furry mass of web where the spider tends to hang around.

Here we have a very slightly older spider with a male very close to her. Males are very small in comparison to the adult spiders, which you'll see a bit further down. I saw many males this year though I never saw them doing the actual business nor being eaten! Note also in this photo is a moult, known as an exoskeleton. Like many insects, as they grow they shed their outer shell. I tried to take one to keep when the spider wasn't there any more, but it fell apart in my fingers, it was so delicate.

A more mature spider with its wrapped up dinner.

This is part of our ditch between us and the neighbours where many of the spiders could be found, especially around the Oregano which is abundant in the ditch area. This ditch is a passageway for butterflies and other insects, so a good place for spiders to find food.

Underside view of a male spider on its own - I found that after some of the females disappeared that the males would hang around alone for a few days until they presumably went off to find another female.

Now here's a mature female from the under side, with two males. Lucky lady - she had a choice!

You can really see the difference in size now.

This is part of my Nectar Bar and in this patch there were eventually seven mature Wasp Spiders!

The most I counted at one time was 23, but sadly, one by one they disappeared, whether they have been predated or what, I don't know. I'm very disappointed as I think I had some around until September last year, and I have only found one egg sac so far, in the Valerian. Hopefully there will be more in the ditch.

I read that Wasp Spiders can be predated by birds, praying mantises, lizards and wasps, that's not all wasps but probably one of the spider hunting wasps.

We are off in the Moho next week to Provence again, but further to the north of the region in some of the regional parks in the mountains that we haven't visited before, though we'll finish off at our favourite beachside campsite for a few days as usual!

I'll then write about some of our travels during the winter like I did last year. See you in a few weeks! 😀