Wild bees in the UK: species, nests and how to help

Wild bees in the UK: over 270 species, 24 of them bumblebees. How to recognise them, where they nest, why a third are declining and what helps in your garden.

Wild bees are all the bees that live without help from beekeepers, and the UK has over 270 species of them: 24 bumblebees, more than 250 solitary bees, and the honey bee as the one managed species. Most wild bees are solitary, make no honey and nest in the ground. They pollinate wild flowers, fruit and crops, and about a third of the species studied in Britain have lost ground since 1980.

The honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the bee everyone knows because people keep it. It is one species among several hundred. This guide explains how to recognise the others, how they live, why many are declining and what actually helps them, from a lawn left unmown to a bee hotel done properly.

How many species of wild bee live in the UK?

Over 270 species, almost all of them wild

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust puts the total at over 270 bee species in the UK. Of these, 24 are bumblebees, more than 250 are solitary bees, and one is the honey bee. Defra’s Pollinator Action Plan for 2021 to 2024 gives the same order of magnitude, with “over 250 species of bee” living in the wild, alongside a single managed honey bee, and around 6,000 insect species of all kinds involved in pollination in the UK.

The reference for identifying them is Steven Falk’s Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland, illustrated by Richard Lewington. Records from naturalists across the country are gathered by BWARS, the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society, whose data underpin most of what we know about where each species lives and how its range is changing.

Area	Bee species	Source
World	over 20,000	widely cited figure
UK, all bees	over 270	Bumblebee Conservation Trust
UK, bumblebees	24	Bumblebee Conservation Trust
UK, solitary bees	over 250	Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Defra
UK, managed bees	1 (the honey bee)	Defra

Species numbers fall as you move north and west. The warm, dry, sandy heaths and chalk downs of southern England hold the richest bee faunas, while Scotland has fewer species but some that are found nowhere else in Britain, such as the great yellow bumblebee in the far north and west.

Six families of bees

Bees are a branch of the wasp family tree whose larvae feed on pollen and nectar instead of prey. British bees fall into six families, described in the BWARS introduction Bees in Britain: four “short-tongued” families (Colletidae, Andrenidae, Halictidae and Melittidae) and two “long-tongued” ones (Megachilidae and Apidae).

Family	Typical UK genera	What to look for
Andrenidae	Andrena (mining bees), Panurgus	spring bees, pollen carried on the hind legs, nests in the ground
Halictidae	Halictus, Lasioglossum (furrow bees), Sphecodes (blood bees)	small to medium, often pale bands on the abdomen, ground nesters
Colletidae	Colletes (plasterer bees), Hylaeus (yellow-face bees)	cells lined with a waterproof secretion; yellow-face bees almost hairless
Melittidae	Melitta, Dasypoda, Macropis	often tied to a few plants
Megachilidae	Osmia (mason bees), Megachile (leafcutters), Anthidium, Coelioxys	pollen carried on a brush of hairs under the abdomen
Apidae	Apis, Bombus, Anthophora (flower bees), Nomada (nomad bees)	the most varied family: honey bee, bumblebees, flower bees, cuckoo bees

How are wild bees different from honey bees?

People often talk about “the bee” and “wild bees” as if they were opposites. The real difference is the way of life. A honey bee colony is perennial and holds tens of thousands of workers; the BWARS text gives a maximum of probably 75,000 to 80,000 in a managed hive. Bumblebee nests are far smaller, typically 50 to 400 bees according to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and die out each autumn. Most other wild bees are solitary. For the detail of how a honey bee colony works, see our guide to the honey bee colony, from queen to workers.

Feature	Honey bee	Bumblebees	Solitary bees
Social life	perennial colony, one queen, tens of thousands of workers	annual colony of about 50 to 400 bees	each female builds and stocks her own nest
Winter	the whole colony, in a cluster	only newly mated queens, hibernating	usually as a larva, pupa or adult sealed in the nest
Honey	large stores	a little nectar in wax pots	none
Foraging range	several kilometres	hundreds of metres to a few kilometres	often a few hundred metres
Flight season	most of the year	roughly February to autumn	often just a few weeks per species
Diet	generalist	generalist	generalist or specialist

A solitary bee that flies for only four to six weeks a year has to find its flowers at exactly that time, close to its nest, with no stores to fall back on. That is why the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan aims for food and shelter every 200 metres: many solitary bees simply cannot travel further.

Generalists and specialists

Many wild bees visit a wide range of flowers. Others collect pollen from only one plant family or genus; these are called oligolectic. The ivy bee depends on ivy flowers in autumn, the heather colletes on heather, and the large scabious mining bee on field scabious and small scabious. Specialists disappear with their host plant, which is one reason they are more vulnerable than generalists.

How do you recognise the main groups of UK wild bees?

Naming a solitary bee to species often needs a hand lens or a microscope, but the main groups can be told apart by eye.

Bumblebees (Bombus)

Large, round and very furry, banded with yellow, white, orange or black. In spring a queen that has hibernated alone starts a nest, often in an old mouse or vole hole, a compost heap or a bird box. Workers come first, then males and new queens; in autumn the colony dies and only the mated young queens survive the winter. Bumblebees fly in cool, dull weather when other bees stay at home, and they “buzz pollinate”, shaking pollen out of flowers such as tomatoes and blueberries.

The “big six” of gardens are the buff-tailed, white-tailed, red-tailed, early, common carder and garden bumblebees. The tree bumblebee, with its ginger-brown thorax, black abdomen and white tail, is now common in gardens and parks too. It usually nests above ground, often in bird boxes and roof spaces, with up to 150 workers, and the males that gather outside the entrance are harmless. Six UK bumblebees are cuckoos, laying their eggs in the nests of other bumblebees.

Mason bees (Osmia)

The red mason bee, Osmia bicornis, is the most common visitor to bee hotels. Gingery-brown and a little smaller than a honey bee, it flies from about March to June. Males emerge first and have a tuft of pale hair on the face. The female builds a row of cells in a hollow stem or hole, each stocked with pollen and closed with a wall of damp mud, which gives the group its name. The new adults form in late summer but stay in their cocoons until the following spring. Mason bees are excellent pollinators of apple, pear and other fruit blossom.

Mining bees (Andrena)

Andrena is one of the largest genera of bees in Britain. Mining bees are mostly honey bee size or a little smaller and are very active in spring on willow, blackthorn, fruit blossom and dandelion. The tawny mining bee, Andrena fulva, is the one most people notice: the female is covered in bright fox-red hair. Females dig burrows in short turf, lawns and banks, sometimes in loose groups of hundreds, each topped with a small volcano of soil. Those mounds are often mistaken for ant hills.

Furrow bees and other small dark bees (Lasioglossum, Halictus)

Small, often dark bees with faint pale bands on the abdomen, abundant in gardens, verges and brownfield sites. They nest in the ground. Some species are primitively social, with several females sharing a nest or a mother and her daughters working together.

Leafcutter bees and wool carders (Megachilidae)

Leafcutter bees cut neat circles and ovals from the leaves of roses, lilac and other shrubs to line their nest cells. The semicircular notches on your roses are their work and do the plant no harm. The wool carder bee, banded yellow and black like a wasp, combs the fluff from woolly plants such as lamb’s ear to line its nest, and the males fiercely defend patches of flowers. Members of this family carry pollen on a brush of hairs under the abdomen, often bright orange or yellow.

Flower bees (Anthophora)

The hairy-footed flower bee, Anthophora plumipes, is one of the first solitary bees of spring in southern gardens, often on lungwort and red dead-nettle. It looks like a small bumblebee but flies in fast, darting bursts and hovers in front of flowers. Females are black with orange pollen brushes on the hind legs; males are brown with long hairs on their middle legs.

Plasterer bees and yellow-face bees (Colletes, Hylaeus)

Plasterer bees look like small, neatly striped honey bees. The ivy bee, Colletes hederae, is the best-known. It was first recorded in Britain at Worth Matravers in Dorset in 2001, has since spread across southern England and Wales into the Midlands, and reached Ireland in 2021, when a group of about 1,000 nests was found in County Wexford. Its flight season, from late August to November, is timed to ivy flowering. Yellow-face bees are tiny, black, almost hairless and marked with white or yellow on the face. They carry pollen in their crop rather than on hairs and are easily taken for small wasps.

Cuckoo bees

According to BWARS, about a third of solitary bees parasitise other solitary bees. These cuckoo bees collect no pollen: they lay an egg in another bee’s nest and their larva eats the stores. They are thinly haired, often red, yellow and black, and look like wasps: nomad bees (Nomada), blood bees (Sphecodes), sharp-tailed bees (Coelioxys). Seeing them is good news, as they only persist where their hosts are thriving.

To tell bees from wasps and hoverflies, see the question at the end of the article.

Where do wild bees nest?

BWARS notes that the majority of British bees dig underground nests: mining bees, furrow bees, plasterer bees and the Melittidae are all ground nesters. Most of the Megachilidae, the mason and leafcutter bees, nest above ground in existing holes, hollow stems or dead wood. Bumblebees use cavities, either in the ground or above it.

Nest type	Examples	What they need
Burrows in the ground (the majority)	mining bees, furrow bees, plasterer bees, many flower bees	bare or sparsely vegetated soil in the sun, sandy or loamy, flat or on a bank
Hollow or pithy stems	yellow-face bees, small carpenter bee, some mason bees	bramble, elder and dead stems left standing
Dead wood	some mason and leafcutter bees	standing dead trees, stumps, untreated timber
Existing holes	red mason bee, leafcutter bees	beetle holes in wood, crevices, bee hotel tubes
Empty snail shells	a few mason bees	dry, short chalk and limestone grassland
Soft mortar and earth banks	some flower bees	old walls and cob, sunny clay banks
Old rodent holes, tussocks, bird boxes	bumblebees	rough grass, hedge bottoms, sheds and roof spaces

For almost every solitary bee the routine is the same: the female builds a cell, packs it with a ball of pollen moistened with nectar, lays an egg, seals it and starts another. As BWARS puts it, she will never see her offspring, which emerge the following spring, or later the same summer in species with two broods a year.

A year of wild bees in the UK

The table below fits lowland England; in Scotland, northern England and upland Wales the spring species appear later.

Months	Wild bees you are likely to see
February and March	bumblebee queens (buff-tailed queens even in winter in mild southern towns), hairy-footed flower bee, first mining bees on willow
April and May	peak diversity: mining bees, red mason bee, nomad bees, flower bees, early bumblebee workers
June and July	leafcutter bees, wool carder bee, yellow-face bees, furrow bees, busy bumblebee colonies
August	furrow bees, heather and late leafcutter bees, new bumblebee queens and males
September to November	ivy bee, last furrow bees, young bumblebee queens feeding up before hibernation
December and January	very little, except winter-active buff-tailed bumblebees in some southern areas

Why are wild bees declining in the UK?

A third of species losing ground

The clearest national picture comes from a 2019 study in Nature Communications by Gary Powney and colleagues at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, built on records from the national recording schemes, including BWARS. They modelled the distribution of 353 species, 139 bees and 214 hoverflies, across Great Britain from 1980 to 2013.

33% of the species had lost range, about a tenth had gained, and the rest showed no clear change.
On average, each 1 km square lost 11 pollinator species: 4 bees and 7 hoverflies.
Upland species fared worst, declining by 55% on average.
The 22 bee species that are key pollinators of crops actually increased their average occupancy by 12%, a reminder that the generalists that thrive in farmland are not the species in trouble.

The study measured where species occur, not how many individuals there are, and it covers Great Britain, not Northern Ireland. But it confirms what naturalists had long reported: most of the gains were made by common, adaptable species, and the losses fell on specialists.

For bumblebees, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust says two species died out in the UK during the last century, and eight of the remaining 24 are now conservation priority species after large declines in their range. The great yellow bumblebee survives only in the far north and west of Scotland, and the shrill carder bee in a handful of places in south Wales and southern England. On the island of Ireland, the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan launched in July 2026 states that a third of bee species are at risk of extinction.

The main causes

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust and Buglife point to the same pressures, which add up rather than act alone:

Loss of flower-rich habitat. Buglife estimates that over 97% of England’s flower-rich grassland has been lost since the 1930s, an area the size of Wales; the Trust gives the same 97% figure for wildflower meadows across the UK.
Fragmentation. The patches that remain are small and far apart, which is a serious problem for bees that forage only a few hundred metres from their nest.
Pesticides. Insecticides can kill bees outright or impair their foraging and breeding; herbicides remove the flowers they feed on.
Climate change and extreme weather. Shifts in the timing of the seasons can put bees out of step with their flowers, while floods, droughts and storms drown hibernating queens or cut off nectar.
Competition and disease. The Trust lists competition from honey bees and commercially reared bumblebees, which can also spread disease, among the pressures on habitat quality.

The Asian hornet hunts other insects as well as honey bees. It is not established in the UK, and every sighting should be reported so it can be destroyed.

Do honey bees compete with wild bees?

The honey bee is not the enemy of wild bees, and beekeepers are among the people who plant most for pollinators. But a strong colony collects a great deal of nectar and pollen, and where many hives are crowded onto limited forage, less is left for everything else.

What NatureScot advises

The clearest UK guidance comes from NatureScot, whose advice on honey bees and beekeeping on protected areas was first issued in 2018 and reviewed in July 2026. It sets out the evidence and then a precautionary position:

Honey bees forage on a very wide range of plants and recruit nestmates efficiently, so they can quickly dominate flowers that wild bees also need. Wild bees may move to poorer flowers or fly further, and some studies have found lighter bees and fewer, smaller offspring near honey bees.
Densities of bumblebees and solitary bees have been found to fall when hives are brought in and rise again when they are taken away.
Competition is most likely where food is scarce: small sites, uniform landscapes, high latitudes and altitudes, the start and end of the season, and cold or dry years. Much of Scotland’s uplands and islands fit that description.
Honey bees carry viruses and parasites that also occur in bumblebees and solitary bees, probably passed on via shared flowers. The direction of transmission is unclear, but managed honey bees carry much higher viral loads and are considered the main reservoir where hive densities are high.

Its conclusion is that honey bees should not be introduced to protected areas, or to places with rare, vulnerable or declining wild pollinators, particularly where there is no history of beekeeping. NatureScot is also open about the limits: much of the evidence is circumstantial, because experiments with free-flying bees are “not straightforward”.

What the wider research says

Results vary a lot between landscapes. A systematic review by Rachel Mallinger, Hannah Gaines-Day and Claudio Gratton (PLoS ONE, 2017) looked at all the published studies: among those on competition, 53% found negative effects on wild bees, 28% no effect and 19% mixed effects. For disease, 70% reported possible negative effects. The evidence is solid that competition happens where hives are dense and forage is limited. It is much thinner on whether this reduces the breeding success and populations of wild bees, which few studies have measured.

With a couple of hives in a mixed, flower-rich landscape, any effect is hard to detect. The question matters more in cities, where rooftop and corporate hives have multiplied, and on heaths, moors and islands, where flowers are scarce and rare bees live.

What a beekeeper can do

Match hive numbers to the forage, not the other way round. Adding colonies does not add flowers. Our guide on where to put a beehive explains how to assess the forage around a site.
Avoid sensitive sites: SSSIs, nature reserves and places where rare bees have been recorded, especially in the uplands and on islands, unless the site manager has agreed.
Plant and sow for bees to increase the forage rather than share it more thinly.
In towns, think twice before adding a hive where there are already many. Supporting wild bees with flowers can do more good than another colony.
Keep your colonies healthy, since disease that spills from managed bees is part of the concern.

Are bee hotels worth it?

The bee hotel has become a symbol of helping wildlife. It can be useful, but it is never a substitute for habitat.

What a bee hotel really does

A well made hotel attracts mainly red mason bees, leafcutter bees, yellow-face bees and some solitary wasps, and lets you watch females sealing their tubes with mud or leaf pieces. It is a good way for children and adults to get to know solitary bees.

Its limits

It ignores most species. The majority of UK bees nest in the ground and will never use a hotel. Sections stuffed with pine cones, straw or bricks look attractive but house almost no bees.
It concentrates parasites and disease. Hundreds of nests side by side draw cuckoo bees, parasitic wasps, mites and moulds. A big hotel that is never cleaned can become a trap rather than a refuge.
It does not always help the bees you intend. In Toronto, Scott MacIvor and Laurence Packer (PLoS ONE, 2015) followed about 600 bee hotels for three years. Native solitary wasps occupied almost three quarters of them each year, introduced bee species made up about a quarter of the more than 27,000 bees and wasps recorded, and native bees were more heavily parasitised than introduced ones. Canada is not Britain, but the warning about concentration and parasites applies here too.
It is useless without flowers. With no forage within a few hundred metres, females cannot stock their cells.

Getting it right

Element	Practical advice
Size	several small hotels rather than one big one
Materials	hollow bamboo or reed stems, paper tubes, or hardwood blocks drilled with clean holes
Hole diameter	a mix of sizes, from a few millimetres up to about 1 cm, since each species has its own preference
Depth	deep enough for a row of cells, and closed at the back
Finish	smooth holes without splinters, untreated wood
Position	facing south or south-east in morning sun, sheltered from rain, well off the ground, firmly fixed so it does not swing
Upkeep	replace tubes or stems every couple of years; add wire mesh if birds raid it

How can you help wild bees in your garden and beyond?

The most effective things are also the simplest, and most of them cost nothing.

Grow flowers from February to November, and let wild ones bloom: dandelion, clover, bird’s-foot trefoil, knapweed, bramble, ivy. Our guide to plants for bees through the seasons will help you fill the gaps, including the June gap.
Leave bare ground. A sunny patch of bare or thinly vegetated soil, a south-facing bank, a path edge or a pile of unwashed sand will be used by mining bees. This helps more species than anything else you can do.
Mow less, and later. Leave parts of the lawn uncut until late summer, or cut the rest less often so clover and self-heal can flower. Rotate the patches you leave long.
Keep dead stems and dead wood. Leave bramble, elder and tall perennial stems standing until spring, and keep a stump or log pile in the sun.
Avoid insecticides and weedkillers. In a garden they are rarely necessary, and the “weeds” in a lawn are often the best bee flowers.
Go easy on fertiliser, which helps vigorous grasses at the expense of wild flowers.
Join up habitats. Hedges, flowery verges and ponds form a network. Buglife’s B-Lines map, covering England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, shows the pathways where new flower-rich habitat links existing sites best, with a target of at least 150,000 hectares restored or created.
Add a small bee hotel as a bonus, never instead of flowers and bare soil.
Count pollinators. A FIT Count for the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme takes 10 minutes: watch a 50 x 50 cm patch of one kind of flower and record every insect that lands, between 1 April and 30 September, in dry weather at 13°C or more in sunshine (15°C if cloudy). Results go in through the FIT Count app or the online form. You can also send bee records to BWARS.

If you keep bees, all of this helps your colonies too: varied, plentiful forage is the foundation of healthy colonies, as our page on the honey bee life cycle explains.

What are the UK governments doing for pollinators?

Pollinator policy is devolved, so each nation has its own plan.

England

The National Pollinator Strategy for England ran for ten years, from 2014 to 2024. It was delivered through successive implementation plans and then the Pollinator Action Plan 2021 to 2024, organised around four themes: the evidence base, land management, pollinator health and engaging people. That plan values pollinators at the equivalent of more than £500 million a year to UK agriculture and food production, and links them to the legally binding target to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030.

In a written answer on 16 December 2025, Defra minister Mary Creagh confirmed that, following the end of the strategy in 2024, Defra will deliver a refreshed Pollinator Action Plan as part of the wider Environmental Improvement Plan. No publication date was given. The same answer noted that Defra part-funds the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, the only scheme producing systematic national data on the abundance of bees, hoverflies and other flower visitors, and referred to the government’s December 2024 commitment to end the use of banned neonicotinoid pesticides in England.

Scotland

The Pollinator Strategy for Scotland 2017-2027, published by NatureScot, sets out how Scotland can remain a place where pollinators thrive. Its implementation plan was revised in March 2021, with progress reports for 2023, 2024 and 2025. NatureScot’s guidance on honey bees in protected areas, described above, is one of its practical outcomes.

Wales

The Welsh Government published its Action Plan for Pollinators in Wales in July 2013, setting out why pollinators matter and how the government hopes to slow or reverse their decline. It is backed by the Bee Friendly scheme, which encourages places across Wales to become pollinator friendly.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland shares the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan with the Republic of Ireland. The third phase, for 2026 to 2030, was launched on 9 July 2026 at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin by DAERA Minister Andrew Muir and Ireland’s Minister of State Christopher O’Sullivan, and is led in Northern Ireland by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency. It sets 50 strategic aims and 75 success metrics across ten work packages, from farmland to transport networks and businesses, and aims for “pockets for nature” every 200 metres. The first two phases delivered 267 actions.

Every one of these plans depends on data, and on gardens, farms and verges where wild bees can find a home. The next few years, with England’s refreshed action plan and Scotland’s strategy reaching 2027, will show whether the UK can turn the decline of its 270 bee species around.

Frequently asked questions

How many species of bee are there in the UK?

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust counts over 270 bee species in the UK: 24 bumblebees, more than 250 solitary bees and a single honey bee, Apis mellifera. Defra's Pollinator Action Plan gives the same picture, with over 250 wild bee species. Worldwide there are more than 20,000 bee species, so Britain has a small but varied share, richest in the warm, sandy south of England.

Do solitary bees sting?

Only females have a sting, and solitary bees almost never use it on people: they have no colony or honey store to defend. In many small species the sting is too weak to pierce human skin. Bumblebees can sting if they are squashed or their nest is disturbed. Male bees, like the red mason bee males that patrol bee hotels in spring, cannot sting at all.

Do wild bees make honey?

Not in any amount you could harvest. A solitary bee mixes pollen and nectar into a small loaf in each brood cell, lays an egg on it and seals the cell. Bumblebees store a little nectar in wax pots inside the nest, enough to see the colony through a day or two of bad weather. Only honey bee colonies build up surplus honey that a beekeeper can take.

Are bee hotels any good?

They help a minority. Bee hotels only suit species that nest in hollow stems or holes in wood, such as red mason bees and leafcutter bees, while most UK solitary bees dig nests in the ground. A small, well made hotel with clean tubes that you replace every couple of years does more good than a large decorative one. Flowers and patches of bare soil matter more.

What are the little mounds of soil on my lawn in spring?

They are very often the nests of mining bees, most famously the tawny mining bee, which flies from March to May. Each volcano-shaped mound has a hole in the middle leading to a female's burrow. The bees are harmless, the mounds do the lawn no damage and they disappear within a few weeks. Simply avoid scarifying or treating the lawn while the bees are flying.

Is keeping honey bees bad for wild bees?

A hive or two in a flower-rich area has little measurable effect. Problems arise where many colonies share limited forage. NatureScot advises against bringing honey bees into protected areas or places with rare or declining wild pollinators, because honey bees can dominate flowers and share viruses with bumblebees. Studies give mixed results, so the sensible rule is to match hive numbers to the forage available.

What is the rarest bumblebee in the UK?

Two of the rarest are the great yellow bumblebee, now confined to the far north and west of Scotland, and the shrill carder bee, found at only a handful of sites in south Wales and southern England. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust lists eight of the UK's 24 bumblebee species as conservation priorities, and two species died out here in the last century.

How can I tell a bee from a hoverfly or a wasp?

Bees are usually hairy and carry pollen on their back legs or under the abdomen. Wasps are smoother, often bright yellow and black, with a narrow waist. Hoverflies, which mimic bees and wasps, have only one pair of wings, very large eyes, short stubby antennae, and often hover motionless in mid-air. Watching how an insect flies is often the quickest clue.

Sources

Why bees need our help, Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Different types of bee (2024), Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Tree bumblebee (species guide), Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Bees in Britain, chapters 1 to 3 (G. Allen), Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS)
Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland (S. Falk, illustrated by R. Lewington), Field Studies Council, Biodiversity identification signpost
Widespread losses of pollinating insects in Britain (Nature Communications 10, 2019), G. D. Powney, C. Carvell, M. Edwards, R. K. A. Morris, H. E. Roy, B. A. Woodcock and N. J. B. Isaac
Pollinator Action Plan 2021 to 2024 (May 2022), Defra
National Pollinator Strategy: implementation plans and progress reports, Defra, GOV.UK
Written question on pollinator conservation, answered by Mary Creagh MP on 16 December 2025, UK Parliament, written question UIN 97867
Pollinator Strategy for Scotland 2017-2027, NatureScot
Guidance: Honey bees and beekeeping on protected areas (reviewed July 2026), NatureScot
Action plan for pollinators, Welsh Government
Ambitious new All-Ireland Pollinator Plan aims to create pockets for nature every 200 metres (9 July 2026), DAERA, Northern Ireland
FIT Counts: help us monitor pollinators, UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS)
B-Lines, Buglife
Ivy bee (bug directory), Buglife
The ivy bee, Colletes hederae, in Ireland (Irish Naturalists' Journal 39, 2022), F. L. W. Ratnieks, O. Beckett, B. Nelson and Ú. FitzPatrick, University of Sussex
Do managed bees have negative effects on wild bees? A systematic review of the literature (PLoS ONE, 2017), R. E. Mallinger, H. R. Gaines-Day and C. Gratton
'Bee hotels' as tools for native pollinator conservation: a premature verdict? (PLoS ONE, 2015), J. S. MacIvor and L. Packer