Lancaster park creates a buzz as bees log in

Guests at a top holiday park near Lancaster are being asked to keep their eyes open for thousands of extra visitors winging their way to its grounds next year.

Moss Wood caravan park in Cockerham hopes that all the new arrivals will be “solitary bees”, a species said by nature bodies to be under serious threat.

An imaginative habitation project has seen the park create thousands of tiny timber tunnels bored in hardwood logs which are now positioned in piles throughout the grounds.

According to park owner Henry Wild, Moss Wood is now a safe haven where the harmless, non-aggressive insects can be helped to re-build their numbers.

The tunnels provide perfect homes in which solitary bees can make cells of nests for their larvae.

With the bees keeping busy until late autumn, Henry hopes that park guests will report back on sightings which will confirm their nesting activity.

Research into the declining bee population, he said, suggested that Moss Wood held three trump cards which favour it as a honeypot destination for the insects:

“We’re fortunate here to have a great diversity of wild flowers which produce an abundance of the nectar and pollen which bees collect,” said Henry.

“Moss Wood also has close proximity to streams and ditches which yield a ready supply of mud used by solitary bees as plaster to wall-up the cells in which they have left eggs and food.

“But perhaps most significantly, we long ago declared Moss Wood to be no-go zone for pesticides and insecticides of the type often blamed for bee loss.

“We can now accommodate thousands of extra bees, and I hope we will also find some less common types from among the two hundred species known to exist,” said Henry.

Holiday guests are being asked to report via Twitter if they identify any comings and goings from the bees’ new bijou timber homes.