Last Sunday morning I was walking in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns. I was feeling a bit tired and unenthusiastic, and for once was not really thinking about recording insects. But it’s impossible to completely turn off the entomological instincts, and a fairly large cuckoo bee (or nomad bee, genus Nomada) caught my eye. It was flying among the vegetation at the top of a bank on BBOWT‘s Grangelands nature reserve.

Armed Nomad bee female at Grangelands – very fuzzy photo!
I took a quick snap but wasn’t very careful about it, and the bee soon vanished into the undergrowth. But it had looked somehow different, and as I walked home it dawned on me that it just might have been something special. By the time I got home I was keen to see the photo, but I’d done a really poor job – blurry and distant. Even so, what few details I could make out were consistent with it being something potentially very special: was there a chance it could be the Armed Nomad Bee, Nomada armata.

Source: Rise of the Armed Nomads – Kitenet