new books

Had an enjoyable day at the AES Exhibition last weekend, great to catch up with loads of people I haven't seen for ages. Some new books out too, including:

• The latest (vol. 5 part 17c) in Mike Morris's series of weevil keys for the Royal Ent Soc. These keys are becoming much more nicely laid-out and user-friendly since the Field Studies Council started producing them for the RES, and this new key is a great improvement over the keys in Joy, which is probably all most of us have had access to up till now. However, they're still a challenging group, and not for the first time in this set of keys I hit a problem with a specimen that didn't really fit the keys. Maybe it's me getting it wrong of course, but I'll need to check it next time I'm near a museum.
• And also the latest in the series of Surrey wildlife atlases, this time on bees, by David Baldock. This covers all the solitary and social bees recorded in the county, and as well as the usual dot maps there are informative species accounts, a very welcome new key to bee genera (by Graham Collins), and a set of 48 superb colour plates. Highly recommended, available from Surrey Wildlife Trust.
• A new AES book on the larger water beetles, by Peter Sutton. Nicely written text full of anecdotes and clearly showing the author's enthusiasm for this group of beetles. Keys to the larger species and lots of background information.