Category: Insects

Air Bee & Bee

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.

A few workers found their way into the back bedroom yesterday but unfortunately most of them didn’t survive until this morning, when I released them.

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.

Hoverflies in the Herbage

herbage

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.

High Batts

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.

Bumblebees

bumblebee sketches

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.

sketching bumblebees

Moth

moth

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.

moth

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

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.

Common Darter

common darter

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.

Southern Hawker

Southern hawker dragonfly

This southern hawker dragonfly, Aeshna cyanea, was hawking around by a sheltered path through the woodland at RHS Harlow Carr Gardens but obligingly perched on a rhododendron leaf, allowing us to photograph it. This is a male, distinguished by the three blue-spotted segments at the tip of its abdomen.

Woodland at Harlow Carr

A nuthatch calls insistently as we take the path behind the Doric Temple.

Rhododendron

These twisted trunks remind me of old olive trees, but I think that they’re Rhododendrons.

Sequoia bark

Giant Sequoia bark has a spongy texture, which acts as insulation in forest fires. Much as I like sequoias, I’m sorry to hear that large plantations of them are being planted on some Welsh hillsides: this might be an efficient way of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere but it won’t do a lot for another key environmental problem, the loss of biodiversity.

Red-tailed Bumblebee

Red-tailed bumblebee

No prizes for guessing that this is a red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, but it’s different to a regular worker, as this is a male, with a yellow collar and cap and a foxy-coloured ‘tail’ that’s more orange-red than scarlet. On a dull afternoon at Wrenthorpe on Friday, it was doing what drones do best, hanging around taking a break on our friends’ herbaceous border alongside another equally unmotivated male.

Helophilus Hoverfly

Hoverfly sketch
Hoverfly, Helophilus pendulus, on Himalayan balsam leaf.

In most hoverflies you can tell which is the male by looking at the eyes: in males there’s no gap between them, presumably an adaptation because the males spend so much time hovering, keeping an eye out for females or rival males. Helophilus hoverflies are different: the male does have a gap between the eyes, so you have to look at the tip of the abdomen. In the female this is pointed while in the male its rounded off with a genital capsule.

So this is a male Helophilus pendulus, a species name that translates as ‘pendent sun-lover’, appropriate as in summer male hoverflies typically hover, more or less on the spot, as if suspended by an invisible thread.