Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This striking-looking streaked plant bug, Miris striatus, hitched a ride on my shorts as we walked through the wooded fringe of Brodsworth Hall gardens on Sunday.
It’s a bug, not a beetle, so it has piercing mouthparts, which it uses to suck aphids, moth larvae and leaf beetles but it can also feed on young leaves and unripe fruits. In Britain it’s often found on hawthorn or oak.
Another sketchbook page from our short break in Northumberland and it’s another view from a table in a cafe overlooking a lagoon in a restored landscape, this time at the Lookout Café at the Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre at the northern end of Druridge Bay.
Red admiral and speckled wood butterflies rested on willow and bramble in the afternoon sun in a sheltered corner at the foot of the wooded slope below the Wildlife Discovery Centre.
This little brown moth must have flown in one summer night and expired, or been the victim of a spider, in a corner of the studio.
A swarm of several hundred honey bees arrived late afternoon yesterday and found a cavity by the bathroom sink waste pipe. A few found their way into the bathroom.
We phoned a beekeeper who offered to come and remove them, using a one-way trap that would lead them out into a hive where eventually the queen would follow them, always the last one out. If we covered every bee-sized hole in the bathroom, we’d be safe using it. As honey bees can squeeze through a 6mm hole that involved a lot of masking tapes, scrunched up newspaper and one strip of cardboard under the sink.
Today though they’ve moved on. There was a bit of activity at breakfast time but nothing like when they arrived and we saw nothing all day. In the afternoon I kept watch for a full fifteen minutes, just to check we hadn’t missed them.
The beekeeper advised us to fill the cavity as soon as possible, using steel wool or aluminium foil and also to block any alternative holes they might use. Our group might have been the scouts and the main swarm might arrive later. It’s amazing how many drilled holes for aerial cables and former pipe fittings we spotted.
Hemlock water-dropwort grows amongst curled dock and nettle alongside the car park at Newmillerdam. A holly blue butterfly rests on the hemlock while hoverflies visit the flowers of creeping buttercup, occasionally chasing each other around. A micro moth resting on a buttercup looks, at first glance, like a tiny fragment of plant debris.
Sawfly, bee-fly and hoverfly, dame’s violet, orchid, crosswort, briar rose and goutweed, orange rust and King Alfred’s Cakes fungus, on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at High Batts nature reserve this morning.
High Batts isn’t far from Lightwater Valley, north of Ripon. Visiting this reserve adjacent to a working quarry is normally by arrangement only but next month they’re holding an open day.
Three approaches to foraging on the herb bed this afternoon: the small double ochre-striped ones tackle the thyme on fast forward, the larger all-ochre thorax bumblebee makes a more thorough job of the chives flowers while the small red-tailed bumblebee – possibly a drone – seems to be settling down for the night on its chive flower.
Prominent moths have tufts emerging from between the wings and there’s also a tail tuft, just visible in my drawing. This moth, caught in the moth trap a couple of nights ago (and released the next day) didn’t have feathery antennae so it’s most likely to be a female.
So far I haven’t narrowed it down to a particular species. To me it’s closest to the iron prominent.
It’s about 1.5 cm long.
Butterbur and kingcups are in flower in a small stream or drainage ditch between the sewage works and the end Industrial Street at Horbury Junction. A fresh-looking peacock butterfly feeds on dandelions alongside the canal.
It’s cool and cloudy this morning, which gives me a chance to get steadily closer to this common darter, Sympetrum striolatum, with my iPhone when it lands at the side of the track at RSPB St Aidan’s.