Tawny Mining Bee

• Its nests give themselves away by a small mound of fine soil with a hole in the centre in the middle of the lawn, like a miniature volcano.
• Although dozens of females may nest in the same garden, each works on her own: it is not a social species.
• It is all but incapable of stinging and is entirely harmless, despite the alarm its furry appearance and sudden spring abundance tend to cause.
• It is one of Europe's most striking wild bees: the female is covered in a dense coat of intense reddish-orange fur, almost like a miniature fox.
• It is solitary but gregarious: each female digs and provisions her own nest, but dozens or hundreds of nests can appear together in the same lawn, which sometimes alarms the owners for no reason at all.
• It is completely harmless: its sting barely pierces human skin and it does not defend the nest.
• It flies very early, from March to May, and is an important pollinator of early-flowering fruit trees such as apple, pear and currant.
• The little mounds of earth it leaves in the lawn are its most visible trace, and they disappear on their own within a few weeks once the flight season ends.
• Its cycle is annual, and the new generation spends the rest of the year underground, as an adult inside its cell, until the following spring.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Lawns, banks and gardens on loose soil in Europe

Sources consulted: Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society; Buglife; Falk, Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland

Best time: March to May, coinciding with the flowering of fruit trees and currants