Dungeness days!!

Dear all

We had a great weekend last week and saw lots of exciting bumblebees on the walks at RSPB Dungeness. Each was preceded by a talk for 30 minutes. We saw lots of humilis and muscorum foraging on water mint, purple loosestrife, tufted vetch, viper's bugloss and the thistles. The weather was fantastic with hot sunshine and hardly any wind (unusual for Dungeness!). Thank you to all the people that came to the stall ,the walks and talks. A very big thank you to Duncan Lawrie and Robert Jones who volunteered on the stall and on the bee walks and talks, they did a great job! As the season is coming to an end I will be doing a few winter bee talks, one at Tunbridge Wells museum and another at RSPB Dungeness. I will post an events list soon on my blog!

Last Thursday I went back to RSPB Dungeness accompanied by Paul Williams from the Natural History Museum. He is the world's leading taxonomist on bumblebees. So it was a real treat to have him come down for the day. He actually did his PhD on declining bumblebee numbers, and all of his fieldwork was down at Dungeness, so we were retracing his steps. We saw lots and lots of humilis and a few muscorum and it was a chance to show him all the great work which has been done on the reserve for the bees!

Over the next few weeks I will be working on our release licence for subt and chasing up on boring paper work. I'm hoping to visit a lot of schools when the new term begins, so if you would like me to come into your school do let me know!!

Until next time...... Nikki

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Academic Excellence at the Heart of Scotland.
The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland,
number SC 011159.