North Curry Wildlife

North Curry Wildlife Group has joined forces with Climate Action Athelney to form the North Curry Environment Group. A website and social media sites are being set up and links will be posted here in due course.

The main focus of this site is the wildlife of the Community Woodland at North Curry'sWhite Street Sports Ground, but we aim to include other areas around the village too (see the Places section). The Projects section shows what we are doing to help wildlife in North Curry, while the Gardening section gives advice on how to help wildlife in our own gardens. Our Species pages include information about some of the plants and wildlife to be found at the Community Woodland.

See also our X account for news or recent wildlife sightings: www.x.com/ncurrywildlife If you have any sightings to report, do be in touch via the Contact Us page.

LATEST NEWS: 10 September 2024

No Bees on the BeeWalk!

By Liz Gibbs

Common Carder Bee on thistle in July 2018 (photo: Sue Ashton)

Some of you may know that at the same time as I do the monthly ‘Plant List’ for the Community Woodland, I also do a BeeWalk for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (see the Blog section of this website for my blog on Beewalking). For the past four months, I have returned the number of zero bumblebees seen on the walk, which is a dreadful result!

My walk is about 1.6 km long and takes in woodland, hedgerow, the Community Woodland and open ground, so opportunities, you would think, for plenty of bees, especially as we can offer them their very own bee banks at the Community Woodland. According to the results from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, it was not only my results in June that were ‘challenging’!

Not surprisingly, much of this can be put down to the very wet spring this year which may have delayed colony formation. Wet weather prevents the queens going out foraging; instead, they spend more time incubating, and fewer workers are produced. In early March, I did see plenty of queens out looking for nest sites, but then the queen had to divide her time between incubating and foraging in between rain showers. She also needs to keep the nest temperature up to around 30 degrees Celsius – quite a feat! This year many more queens will have died than usual. As the eggs in a nest with a queen eventually develop and workers emerge, there should have been plenty of bees around in early May. They were in abundance in my garden, but not at the Woodland!

With a mild summer, things may improve, but so far this has not happened. I would have expected that later broods would have appeared by now. The results from last year showed a good year overall after a poor start, but based on my survey that looks unlikely this year.

It is therefore so much more important that we plant nectar and pollen rich plants in our gardens and elsewhere. We thought we had done just that at the Woodland, but clearly not sufficient or varied enough to tempt bees out of our gardens. Apart from being delightful creatures to watch, bumblebees pollinate many fruits and vegetables, including strawberries, raspberries, peas, beans and tomatoes. A decline in the number of pollinators could affect crop yields, a healthy environment and successful agriculture – which is bad news for all of us!