Andrena scotica is one of the earlier bees to appear and the flight period is mid March to late June with numbers peaking late April and May. The females are facultative communal nesters with a group of them sharing a common entrance to a burrow in which each female tends her own eggs and larvae within a chamber off the main burrow, constructing brood cells within her tunnel and provisioning the cells with pollen and nectar collected from a wide range of flower species. Females will nest singly but normally two or more, and sometimes hundreds of, females will share a single nest entrance. These bees often forage on spring-blossoming shrubs and trees as well as a variety of low-growing flowers. In more southern parts of its distribution there may be a partial second generation in the summer if there is long spell of warm weather. It is thought that the offspring complete their development in their brood cells in which they overwinter as fully developed adults before emerging in the following spring through nest entrance. When the adults first emerge they meet each other in and around the burrows and the females are often mated before they can leave it.
, the larvae are cleptoparasites on A. scotica'' Females of the parasitic
strepsipteran Stylops melittae specialise in parasitising mining bees producing large numbers of larvae on flowers. When the bee forages on the flower for pollen, the larvae attach themselves to the bee. Then, when the bee provisions a nest cell, one or more larval Strepsiptera enter into the larval bee's body and settle in its abdomen. After the larval bee matures, the strepsipteran larvae break through between two of the bee's abdominal segments, pupate while lodged within the host's abdomen, and then the males emerge as
imagos and fly off to mate with virgin, still host-resident, females (i.e., the adult females—which have no wings, antennae, or even eyes—never leave the host). Female Strepsiptera release live young when the parasitized bee forages. The larval Strepsiptera must find their own host to begin the life cycle again. In a study on
Öland three species of
flies were observed at or near the nest entrances of
A. scotica or around flowers upon which the female bees were foraging. These were the
Conopid Myopa buccata, the
bee fly Bombylius major and
anthomyiid Leucophora personata. In addition,
Myopa testacea, was also recorded as a parasite from sampled
A. scotica. Other insects associated with the nests
A. scotica include the
cuckoo bee Nomada marshamella and the violet oil beetle (
Meloe violaceus), the larvae of which attach themselves to foraging bees when they land on flowers and are transported by the bee into the cell where the consume the contents of the cell, including the eggs of the bee. ==Taxonomy==