I raked leaves up in my garden and made an alarming discovery

It’s a thankless garden chore everyone with an outdoor space will probably face each spring: raking leaves – and in my garden, backing onto woodland, it’s a never-ending battle.

They gather from autumn and all , clogging up drainpipes, blocking light from and rotting on decking and patios, and a lot of the time, gardeners will have left leaves to pile up during the cold, wet, rainy and icy winter months. I am no exception to this. On Thursday, I had a day off from writing about pensions and hedge cutting and decided to spend some time sorting the garden out because it was vaguely sunny for once.

As well as , adding kitchen scraps to my compost bin and topping up , I turned my attention to the huge piles of leaves covering my patio, decking and lawn – and this is where I made an alarming discovery. I had spent some time raking leaves, piling them into a bucket and tipping them into my compost bin. Apart from a few millipedes, it was nothing unusual.

But digging out some piles from the side of my greenhouse, I found a very unexpected guest: a dormant, hibernating queen bee.

Usually, bees spend their time in hives through the summer months, gathering nectar from flowers to make honey. Over winter, though, the queen will leave the hive and seek somewhere to settle down for the cold winter months.

I’d actually set up a bee hotel at the bottom of my , hoping to provide refuse for a lonely bee looking for lodgings, but all I’ve found so far is woodlice.

So I was wholly unprepared when I found the bee, curled up, dormant under a leaf which was in a pile sitting against the greenhouse. 

Bees are one of the most important pollinators we have, and their numbers are under serious threat due to climate change and habitat loss. According to Science Direct, bee numbers are thought to be down by 25% globally since 1990, despite being vital to food production.

Of course, I’m not an insect expert, and apart from not wanting to prod or poke it to check further, it’s possible it could be a wasp not a bee. Wasps, too, are vital pollinators in even though they don’t make honey, and their numbers are also under threat, so it’s just as important to keep (unpopular) wasps alive as it is the heralded honeybee too.

Knowing this, I covered the bee back over, plumped up the pile it had been sleeping in and added more leaves around it. I then pushed a plantpot up against the other side of the pile to stop the wind blowing them away (after I’d been disturbing the pile), then made a mental note to leave that area alone.

If I’d been using a leaf blower or leaf vacuum, that would have been it – no more hibernating bee/wasp, and this is a precise example of the kind of everday garden behaviour most of us wouldn’t think twice about which is potentially putting bee populations at risk up and down the country.