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When rangers at Kinver Edge in Staffordshire discovered rare black oil beetles on a stretch of restored heathland, they knew there was only one way they could have arrived there: by hitching a ride on a solitary bee.
“Their life cycle is really cool, probably the most interesting of any British insect,” said Ewan Chapman, the countryside manager for Kinver Edge, as he sets out into the heathland on a warm March morning to try to spot some.
These shiny black beetles, native to the UK, are increasingly vulnerable and completely reliant on a healthy bee population in order to survive.
The female beetles burrow underground where they lay thousands of eggs. These hatch into larvae, which climb up nearby flowers or grass stems and wait for a bee to arrive. The larvae hitch a ride on the bee, consuming pollen, before later re-emerging in a new location as an adult beetle.
“It’s a bit like a Trojan horse situation. They hitch a ride on the back of the bee and so the beetles disperse across the landscape over miles in this way,” said Chapman. “Without a healthy wild bee population there would be no beetles. They’re totally integral to each other’s life cycle.”
It does not take long for the beetles to appear, dotted around on grassy areas off the side of the path. “It looks like they’ve got a waistcoat on that doesn’t fit them,” joked Chapman as he picked up a female gleaming in the sun.
They were recorded in Kinver three years ago, the first sighting of them since records for this area began in the 1970s. The numbers have grown every year to a peak count of 213 spotted in one day this year.
There are five species of oil beetle in the UK, and three are classified as rare. Two species have become extinct in the country. Their numbers have dwindled largely because 85% of England’s heaths have been lost over the past 150 years.
These beetles, along with other species such as adders, small heath butterflies, ruby-tailed wasps and nightjar birds, would have once been abundant in the heathland that historically covered swathes of the West Midlands.
But most of this heathland has either been converted into arable farming land or forested. Now the National Trust is trying hard to preserve and expand the small patches that remain.
“They’re like an intensive care unit for wildlife,” said Chapman. “That large, extensive habitat was a carrying capacity for all sorts of rare wildlife and as that habitat has reduced and reduced and reduced, we’re left with these little remnant islands – they’re trapped in these little life rafts, essentially.”
The National Trust owns hundreds of acres of land around Kinver Edge, probably most famous for its rock houses – the last occupied cave dwellings in England – excavated into sandstone.
It wants to convert more land back into heath, connecting up the pockets to create corridors that will allow the beetles and their fellow heathland species to thrive and expand.
“Kinver at one time would have looked a little bit like California or something quite different altogether,” said James Lawrence, the National Trust project manager for the Sandscapes project, which is working to restore and reconnect heathland areas.
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“It’s a very important ecological landscape, and there’s a really important cultural history there as well. We’re doing quite a lot of work to educate people, and reconnect people with a lost landscape.”
Their plans involve cutting down plantations of conifer trees, planted extensively in the early 20th century to provide timber to fuel future war efforts.
“As you can imagine, any sort of tree removal isn’t without controversy because we are in a climate crisis and people are concerned about carbon and deforestation,” said Lawrence.
“But we’ve also got a biodiversity crisis, and these trees are not there for any biodiversity or carbon value, they’re there for the value of the actual stems.”
The heathland area where the black oil beetles have set up home was once a tree plantation. About 10 years ago, these trees were removed – although the native broadleaf trees were kept – and the heathland has slowly restored over time.
Chapman said: “This only happened as a direct result of this conifer removal, restoration to heath again, creating high-quality sandy habitat, creating a good habitat for the wild bees. Everything was aligned for the beetles to come back and be successful.”
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Between 24 March and 2 April, we will be profiling a shortlist of 10 of the invertebrates chosen by readers and selected by our wildlife writers from more than 2,500 nominations. The voting for our 2025 invertebrate of the year will run from midday on Wednesday 2 April until midday on Friday 4 April
