PURE ELEGANCE
There are few more beautiful sights than a Bee-eater in flight
MOSTLY EATS BEES... Much of the diet consists of bees and wasps, but they will eat a variety of other flying insects, too increase their bodyweight quicker if they are fed on a mixture of both bees and dragonflies, rather than on bees alone. The birds hunt either by gliding on their triangular-shaped wings, suddenly increasing their speed to pursue a nearby insect, or by using the technique known as fly-catching, where they wait on a favoured perch, darting off it to catch any prey item that strays too close to them. Once they have caught their prey, the bird will often take it to a favoured perch, usually a dead bare branch, where it will then smear the rear end of the insect in a sideways wiping motion to dislodge the sting. Like that other birding jewel, the Kingfisher, Bee-eaters are tunnel-nesters. They start to excavate their nest tunnel during the first part of May. It looks like a flattened oval at the entrance, and these tunnels can be about a metre in length. The bird digs these in exposed sandy banks, taking up to 20 days to chisel away at the substrate with its bill, and excavating up to 80 times its own body weight. Sometimes, though, this hard work can be in vain. Many nests are located on low, exposed sandy faces, sometimes no more than a few centimetres higher than surrounding ground level. This makes them extremely vulnerable to grounddwelling predators such as snakes, while the sandy soils mean that other, larger predators find it relatively easy to dig out the nest to take the young or eggs. Despite these losses, though, the Bee-eater is holding its own in Europe, with a relatively stable population, that is gradually expanding northwards in its range. Bee-eaters, as we’ve already seen, do exactly what their name suggests; they eat bees. This has often brought them into conflict with man, particularly beekeepers. I spend much of the year The general shape, rich colours (and the structure of the foot) all betray the Bee-eater’s close relationship to rollers and kingfishers in Extremadura in Spain, and Bee-eaters are very common there, as are beekeepers. Every spring, just after the birds have arrived, the local papers and news channels have reports featuring calls for the birds to be controlled. There is no disputing the fact that these beautiful birds do indeed predate Honey Bees – they will often be seen hunting over the hives themselves – but what is extremely doubtful is whether theyactually have any negative impact on the hives’ productivity. Several studies have shown that an adult Bee-eater will consume between 200 and 250 worker bees a day when it is rearing young. This may seem a lot, but an average single hive (and more often than not there are several hives together) will contain about 100,000 worker bees, and every day a productive hive is producing 2,000 new workers, more than enough to replace those being lost to a pair of Bee-eaters. The argument in areas where there are high densities of nesting Bee-eaters (which prefer to nest in colonies), is that large numbers of Beeeaters lead to much higher losses of bees. But these areas also have large numbers of bee hives producing huge numbers of new bees each day, and indeed it is highly likely that it is the large number of hives that attract the large number
Once they have caught their prey, the bird will often take it to a favoured perch, usually a dead bare branch, where it will then smear the rear end of the insect in a sideways wiping motion to dislodge the sting