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On a beautiful early-autumn morning at High Ash Farm, after another 13 millimetres of welcome rain has turned the fields verdant once more, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin begin at the farmyard entrance. A robin is singing again after its midsummer silence, rooks and jackdaws corkscrew down from the sky in display flight while a peregrine circles high above, and late swallows are still feeding young in the barn. On the flowering ivy they discover a new arrival: ivy bees (Colletes hederae), first recorded in Britain in 2001. These late-season solitary bees, with their orange thoraxes and wasp-like stripes, are gathering the last major nectar flow of the year.
A short drive to Greensides Loke reveals their nesting site — a west-facing sandy bank riddled with rabbit holes and thousands of tiny burrows. Females excavate straw-width tunnels half a metre into the soil, line them with saliva, and provision them with pollen and nectar before sealing them for the winter. Males hover at the entrances and pile onto females in frantic mating clusters. Though solitary, they nest in dense congregations wherever the habitat is right.
In Fox’s Grove the pair turn to fungi and trees. Chicken of the woods (sulphur polypore) glows on a sweet chestnut, while a 250-year-old ash — one of the farm’s giants — stands in its last hours. Ash dieback has rotted its roots to pulp; a trail camera is trained on the trunk, ready to capture the moment it falls. Chris reflects on the 1,500 ash saplings that died young, the black staining of Chalara, and the Norse idea of ash as the tree of life. Once down, the timber will feed beetles, woodworm and more fungi, returning at last to the rich leaf-mould of the woodland floor.
Listener letters bring a perfect comma butterfly displaying the white mark that gives it its name, recordings of a blackcap and a nightingale, and a precise reminder of the Game Act 1831.This episode is a poignant celebration of autumn’s dual nature — new life arriving with the ivy bees, and an ancient giant preparing to fall — ideal for savouring late pollinators, the first fungi of the season, and the quiet power of even the smallest organisms at High Ash Farm.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19791131-episode-2-89-ivy-bees-and-falling-ash.mp3?download=true
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