In much the same manner as all moth trappers hope for a long distance migrant (and they all do) looking out for and finding a species in Nottinghamshire after its UK arrival, has to be another.

Some species take longer to reach us than others and their spread up through the UK can sometimes be astonishingly rapid, as in the case of the Harlequin Ladybird and Western Conifer Seed Bug.

The Ivy Bee Colletes hederae (Schmidt & Westrich, 1993) is also one of our more recent colonisers, one of at least another twelve species which have expanded their way onto the county's fauna list.

This very distinctive solitary bee, was first recorded in Dorset back in 2001. This in turn, coming only eight years after being discovered 'new to science' in southern Europe in 1993. Its arrival at the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust's Skylarks Reserve at Holme Pierrepont (per Adrian Dutton), came after a steadier northward range expansion than some other newly arrived species. The most recent species we know of and the number of years it took them to reach Nottinghamshire, are shown in the table further below.

In all probablility, C. hederae had certainly arrived a year or two earlier than that, most likely in 2014 or 2015 in our view, which would have coincided with its quickening range expansion north through the UK. When we visited the Skylarks Reserve in 2018, we found C. hederae to be much more numerous than we had expected it to be.

After its Dorset arrival back in 2001, several years of further colonisation of new areas and consolidation of previously colonised areas took place. There were new records from along the south coast and by 2009, there were the first records from north of the River Thames. By 2011, it was reported from inland south of Oxford and there were the first ever records from Wales.

Since we first published this page on eakringbirds.com back in September 2018, a number of reports have very kindly been sent to us, showing that Colletes hederae is firmly established in the county.

Confirmed sites for C. hederae to date (October 2020) now include the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust's Skylarks Reserve at Holme Pierrepont (per Adrian Dutton), Netherfield Lagoons in 2017 (Rob Woodward), Beeston Rylands in 2018 (Tim Sexton) and Southwell (Rob Johnson) in 2018, Gedling (Adrian Dutton) and Church Warsop.

In view of these additional records in September and October 2018, the record we previously described as (unconfirmed) from Woodborough, just a few miles north-east of Nottingham in September 2017, now has to be considered extremely likely to have been this species. Woodborough lies on a clay-based soil, whilst Holme Pierrepont and the whole of the Trent Valley is very much sand and gravel.

The sparsely vegetated bank where nests were reported to us by Adrian in 2017 (above photograph) produced much fewer nests than expected, unless there was some degree of burrow excavation by Rabbits creating steeper areas of exposed sandy soil.

The first report of Colletes hederae in Nottinghamshire, not surprisingly (in view of it's southerly location in the county) came from the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust's Skylarks reserve at Holme Pierrepont in 2017, with good numbers noted on Ivy Hedera helix and nest burrows located nearby. But it was undoubtedly already in Nottinghamshire by 2016 and possibly even as early as 2015, based on the good numbers at Skylarks in 2017. There was a reported record from Woodborough on September 17th the same year and was reported in small numbers just up the Trent Valley at Netherfield Lagoons in 2017 and 2018, when it was also found at Southwell for the first time.