Winter discoveries

Val finds a few nesting sites while raking up the leaves

- Val Bourne

I SEEM to have had a lot of leaves this winter, and I got leaf-gatherers’ shoulder as a result – which hurt! Thankfully, I don’t gather up every leaf, only those near bulbs and choice woodlanders. They’re loaded into the barrow and emptied into the wooden leaf-litter bin. Two years later it turns into the most valuable garden mulch of all – crumbly dark leaf litter that I spread on the woodland garden. The leaves and moss on the garden edges are left for nesting birds and roosting hedgehogs.

When I’m raking, every now and again I come across a clump of wet leaves sticking to the ground. I treat these like a roundabout, because the plug of foliage is almost certainly protecting a ground nesting solitary bee’s nest. It’s the porch over the home, so to speak. Some of these underground nests definitely belong to Osmia bicolor, the red-tailed mason bee. This bee is found close to chalk and limestone grassland, so its range is limited to limestone areas of the south and east, although records suggest it is expanding northwards.