Biodiversity UK's support of the Species Recovery Trust's, Tormentil Mining Bee project continues as they look to secure the future of this species.

Most people will not be surprised to learn that the infamous British weather has been making life difficult both for the bees and the project team. The month of July is the time when these beautiful bees would normally be most active and flying. However the early weeks of this month have been very wet and cold, conditions that are not preferable to the bees. The project team remains hopeful that they will see drier, sunnier and warmer conditions in the coming weeks which will enable them to undertake more surveys, record any increase in bee activity and gather important data during a time that is known as the field season.

There is however some good news to report. In spite of the weather the species has been recorded on Allerthorpe Common in reasonable numbers and the team have been using this population to try to establish audio monitoring of the species. This has been done in collaboration with Biodiversity UK's pollinator partners at Agrisound. Stay in touch for more details about our partnership with Agrisound and our projects with them in the coming months.

The accompanying photograph shows a testing site at Allerthorpe which it is hoped will generate sufficient data using audio monitoring techniques. As with all tests, the results are not often what we would like them to be. Surprisingly in this case as the Tormentil Mining Bees are proving to be unusually quiet, even in flight. That aside the recording process is continuing and data capture techniques refined as the project continues to evolve.