I was so keen on photographing a new bee species for our parish that I had to squidge deep into the hedge among the nectaring insects. They were ivy bees, Colletes hederae, named for science in 1993 and first recorded on mainland Britain in 2001. Superficially they are similar to honeybees but larger, slower, brighter, with thorax and legs covered in golden hairs and abdomens banded with five creamy rings.

What was striking, while being in this nose-to-tail intimacy with solitary bees but also many wasps and hornets, was their absolute indifference to me. The latter’s drone was deeper and warmer than its yellow-jacketed relatives, and it put me in mind of a moment with the great author Ronald Blythe – now 95 – at his sanctuary-like home near the Stour in Essex. Immersed in that solitary spot at the end of a long drive, like some patron saint of the southern English countryside, Ronnie turned to me and said: “Hornets,” – they were all around him, nectaring along his hedgerow – “they’re so gentle”.

I wished I could have captured it on video to replay every time someone tells me, with a shiver of horror, how they had them in the garden but fortunately the pest folk came and destroyed the nest. “For the children” is the usual justification.

We seem to have such a problem in this country with swarming insects. Only last week I heard of someone vacuuming up wintering ladybirds. Another friend has been forbidden to have honeybees on her allotment because, as the committee put it, “they get out of hand”.

In fulfilment of Ronnie’s version of his own gentle neighbours, my hornets proved far more camera shy than the ivy bees. As I manoeuvred closer, they crept into the vegetation, feeding out of view, and I assembled only a sequence of identikit parts of their overall beauty: the impossibly narrow tea-stained wings, the rich copper hoops about abdomen and thorax, the broad yellow body pulsing at rest in the sunshine and the bulls’-horn curve of their antennae dipped in pollen thick as honey.