The ivy bee (Colletes hederae) is a solitary mining bee in the family Colletidae, first formally described by Schmidt and Westrich in 1993, and distinguished by dense orange-brown hair bands on the thorax and abdomen. It is a near-obligate pollen specialist (oligolege) on ivy (Hedera helix), timing its entire annual flight period — late August (males) or early September (females) to early November — to coincide with ivy flowering, and provisioning its brood cells almost exclusively with ivy pollen (pollen-load studies document approximately 98.5% ivy pollen). The species nests in aggregations sometimes numbering thousands of burrows in bare sandy or loess soils, including garden lawns, roadside verges, and coastal cliffs. Native to western and central Europe, it colonised southern Britain at Langton Matravers, Dorset, in 2001 and has since spread rapidly northward; its autumn activity on ivy makes it a distinctive garden visitor wherever that plant flowers.

Specialist host plants · 1

Nectar plants · 1

Pollen plants · 1

Western and central Europe including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Greece, and Cyprus. First recorded in Britain (Dorset) in 2001, it has since spread across southern England, Wales, East Anglia, and northward into Yorkshire, County Durham, and southern Cumbria. Also established on the Channel Islands and in Ireland.