I’ve had two trips to Yorkshire Sculpture Park this month to map bees around the site, and this last trip marks the end of my role as Visiting Artist at YSP - where did the time go?!
I’m still going through everything I found and I will make a list of all the bee species identified on the site this summer, plus all the plants they prefer.
This last trip was blustery, cool and rainy at times, so there wasn’t many bees. But I did see lots of common carder bees and a few honey bees feeding on the Himalayan balsam, plus masses of wasps also feeding on the balsam. I found a wasp nest too - lots of them coming and going into the stump of a felled tree.
A lot of the flowers have gone to seed, but there is still patches of devil’s-bit scabious attracting the occasional common carder bee (image above).
There is a pink daisy type garden plant flowering in the formal gardens (not sure its name) that was attracting a couple of white-tailed bumblebees and a beautiful tortoiseshell butterfly.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park