There’s something Elizabethan about the ashy mining bees. The females are 10mm long, black with a bluish reflection, a ruff of grey hair, a further grey ring around the thorax and a furry white facial mask. The males are smaller, squatter and less strikingly marked.



Andrena cineraria is one of 67 species in Britain and Ireland belonging to the mining bee genus. They are hairy little sprites with pollen baskets on their back legs, short tongues and pointed antennae, and the most effective of pollinators. They excavate nests underground in all kinds of soils.

Sometimes, as with the ashies, they nest in aggregations that can number thousands, although Andrena are thought of as solitary rather than social insects. Even though there is no evidence of cooperative worker behaviour they do appear to be moving together, but more like a dance than a factory.

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The binary costume, black and white, ruff and mask, make them look like characters from Elizabethan theatre. Somewhere between a conventicle of nonconformists and “spirits of another sort”, as Shakespeare may have called them in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they flit and bounce around the flowers. There is in them a curious combination of industry and decadence, fun and devotion.

The ashy mining bees, which I’ve not noticed here before, have appeared in some numbers with other mining, flower and bumble bees on a big patch of ground elder flowers. The white umbels of ground elder make perfect stages for the ashies, small enough to each take an individual bee, large enough for the bee to feed on many flowers in one place, but also slightly unstable so that the insects are constantly changing position in a three-dimensional movement.

Although it is anathema to gardeners, I’m an admirer of ground elder, originally brought here by the Romans and used by Elizabethans as a pot herb. I like the complexity of the flower, the anise flavour of the leaves and the sheer audacity of the plant’s irrepressible weediness. It may have a terrible reputation, but together with the bees it becomes a theatre of enchantments.

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