Apple, pear, plum, fig and vine all shunned, her looping flight takes her back to the hawthorn. She lands, embracing the leaf, testing its texture with six gold-fringed legs. With caliper precision, her mandibles measure its width. Rotating forward about her own body’s axis, her jaws shear an arc, a bee’s length, through the surface. Seconds later, wings folded, she allows gravity to tear her free. As she drops, clasping a half-moon disc of green, her flight muscles burst into action and with a buzz of effort she rises on smoky latticed wings and turns for home.
After 20 years, Willughby’s leafcutter bees, Megachile willughbiella, have returned to our garden near Epping Forest. All July I’ve watched, fascinated, as they set about stocking a bee hotel’s bamboo cavities, the cut leaves rolled like cigars to form egg chambers inside. Pollinators, like leafcutters, are often not only short of flowers. Fewer than 2% of holes in woodlands may be suitable; standing deadwood, essential for the larvae of many pollinators, can be scarce.
Each of the four bees I’ve observed has been painstaking in its choice of holes, often taking more than an hour – nine months in human terms. They have been to-ing and fro-ing, revisiting the same holes again and again, inspecting burrs on tree trunks, even distracted by the dark circles of nailheads in fence panels.
A leafcutter’s work is energy-intensive, and time away exposes the pollen and nectar provisions to kleptoparasites, while the bees risk predation. Although our garden seems to contain all the leaves they need, each female has chosen a rotation of sources.
One was exceptional, however. Over two days, I watched her ferry discs from new hawthorn and rose leaves, from Kerria japonica hundreds of metres away and from the tough ribbed leaves of a whitebeam strung with ensnaring spiders’ gossamer. And then, in the late afternoon shadows of the second day, she did something I’d read about but never observed. She switched deliberately from leaves to flowers. From a rose whose white blooms had largely dried to pale brown, she diligently searched out the few fresh petals, sealing her nest with nine separately cut discs over 90 minutes, each one carefully chewed and glued into place.
