New Bee Hotel opens in Lytham St Annes

Vacancies

The latest new 5* bee hotel is rapidly filling up with eager guests. Meanwhile, despite being ramshackle, five existing bee hotels are almost fully occupied.

Bee Hotels

There are posh (expensive) ones, homemade ones are a challenge, and there’s this beauty from B&M for £10. It contains the penthouse filled with wood shavings, luxury rooms on the mezzanine floor, economy apartments with a butterfly hibernation zone on the first floor, and pine cones on the ground floor – all desirable residences for bees, insects, bugs, spiders and butterflies.

Once the hotel was placed on the wall in a sunny position it was a waiting game for a couple of days. The little buzzers didn’t appear to be interested, but it wasn’t long before they started to investigate and two bees wasted no time occupying a room each.

New bee hotel with two occupants

Eleven chambers are now occupied with a twelfth currently being painstakingly sealed. It really is a work of art.

Eleven rooms occupied

Solitary bees

Solitary bees don’t live in colonies like their cousins. They prefer to go it alone. It’s fascinating watching them zip in and out of chambers on the hunt for the best spot to lay their eggs. Fraught with lots of pushing, shoving and angry buzzing they vie for the best room in the house.

This room looks nice – wonder who’s moved in below?

Perfect – I’ll take it

Egg laying

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it …
Cole Porter, 1928

Once she’s chosen her room, the female lays a single egg. Before sealing the chamber with mud she leaves a supply of pollen for her grub to feast on when it hatches. It will remain in its safe haven until the following spring when, as a solitary bee, it vacates its room in the hotel to start the process again.

The old hotels

Five existing 2* residences continue to be popular. It’s evident where previous occupants have nibbled their way out through the mud plug, and where this year’s new residents have been sealed in.

A dilapidated yet still desirable hotel where a bee seals her chamber with mud

The future is looking good
for solitary bees

Lugworm

Knot

Black-headed gulls

In these days
of doing the same old (delightful) walk
there are only so many snapshots
one can take of seabirds, big skies,
wide expanses of sea and sand,
and Mr Pool,
usually a dot in the distance

Big skies, sand, sea and Mr Pool

I’ve decided to embark
on a bit of self-education
These little squiggles
are dotted all over the beach
They’re lugworm casts

Lugworm cast

Never far from one of these squiggles
is a shallow depression
So what’s going on?

The U-bend starts here

Each lugworm lives
in the bottom of a u-shaped burrow

• 

  Lugworm at bottom of u-bend

• 

  Uglyworm

Periodically the lugworm
wriggles backwards
to expel the indigestibles
that form those familiar casts

Earthworms do much the same
on garden lawns
Both animals swallow sand or earth,
digest the food material and eject the rest

New tides wash away the old casts
and deposit fresh sand, food and water
into the u-bend
where the lugworm can live for weeks
– unless Mr Fisherman digs him up for bait!

Fishermen

Snapshots from a morning’s walk

Start of the walk
through a clump
of twisty white poplar trees

Heading for the beach

View from beach
of distant snow-capped hills

North – snowy Lake District

East – Wolf Fell and Parlick with dusting of snow

Cormorant’s view
from deep channel marker
Southport across the river

River Ribble

River Ribble
Lytham windmill ahead

River Ribble – tide coming in

Sea defence at Granny’s Bay

Patterns in the sun

Curlew takes flight from a frosty saltmarsh

Frosty saltmarsh

Sea-buckthorn berries and stonechat

Female stonechat in her larder

Stonechat

End of the walk
along dunes and scrubland –
clump of white poplars ahead