Category: Insects

The Nectar Thief

bumblebee on salvia

At Cannon Hall garden centre, this bumblebee was busy visiting the flowers of a salvia but instead of entering the flower in the usual way it was using the back entrance, checking out those holes nibbled in the back of the flower and bypassing the stamens and stigmas. It occasionally paused, apparently to do a bit of nibbling itself, perhaps to enlarge an existing hole or start another.

Grapevine

grapevine

At Hilary’s Village Store in Cawthorne we sit under a vine laden with bunches of small green grapes. We’re told that this vine is a cutting from a desert grape grown in a large south-facing greenhouse in Scotland. There the grapes were edible – although they were best eaten outside in the garden so that you could spit out the seeds – but here, outside and north-facing, they’re not going to ripen enough.

scone

However we didn’t come here for the grapes, in a village tea garden it had to be cream scones with our lattes.

Link

Hilary’s @ Cawthorne

Gatekeeper

gatekeeper

After yesterday’s sun, this morning was overcast and cool enough for this male gatekeeper to stay perched on a bramble leaf as we photographed it. Gatekeepers are named because the males, distinguished by the dark band of scent glands on their forewings, were often seen patrolling their territory at the entrance to a wood.

Since we first started visiting St Aidan’s RSPB reserve a couple of years ago the main track along the foot of the hill has matured from what you might have called open scrub to something a little closer to woodland edge habitat. The gatekeepers appreciate that but perhaps it doesn’t suit the kestrel that was often seen hovering over this stretch, or the stonechat, which we saw on almost every visit, perching on top of a post. Today the posts have disappeared amongst the long grasses and willow bushes.

The reserve proved to be a good place to try out the Zeiss Victory SF 8×32 binoculars that I’ve got on a 48-hour loan. I was able to focus on the butterfly from as little as about seven feet away and see far more detail than I could with the unaided eye.

common blue damselfly

These common blue damselflies were clasping each other in tandem amongst the grasses.

The 8x32s have a much wider field of view than my regular pocket-sized 8x20s, so I found could quickly focus on any bird: a common tern diving, a linnet perching at the edge of the reedbed and, the most spectacular, a bittern flying high down the valley in the direction of Fairburn Ings.

Buzzard and stonechat at St Aidan’s on a previous visit.

Back home, as I reluctantly prepared to pack away the 8x32s for the courier to collect tomorrow, I was able to use them one last time as a buzzard performed a lap of honour, circling over the meadow.

Dor Beetle

dor beetle

On Wednesday evening, I found this dor beetle lying on its back on the tiles near the back door, kicking its legs in a futile attempt to turn itself upright again. I rescued it and released it on the patio. They’re attracted to light so it may have flown in and made a crash landing when it collided with a cupboard door.

Working in pairs, the adults bury dung for their larvae to feed on.

This looks very like the species Geotrupes stercorarius except for the antennae. According to George McGavin in the RSPB Wildlife of Britain:

the club-ended antennae have 11 segments but are not elbowed”

George McGavin, RSPB Wildlife of Britain, The Definitive Visual Guide

These were elbowed. The beetle was almost an inch long, perhaps 2 centimetres. It was flattened in cross-section, compared to, say, a similar-sized bumblebee.

These beetles are often infested with mites, hence one old name ‘The Lousy Watchman’. I didn’t see any mites on this individual but it had been infected with a fungus and some tiny sporangia were growing from its left jaw and its mouthparts. Picking up spores must be a occupational hazard for a beetle that specialises in digging.

Drawn in Adobe Fresco with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the ‘Natural Inker’ pen and the ‘Color fill’ brush.

Pellucid Fly

This pellucid fly, also known as the pellucid hoverfly, obligingly sat on an umbel of hogweed as we photographed it. It’s one of Britain’s largest flies so although I hadn’t brought my DSLR and macro lens, it still made a good subject for my iPhone.

It’s larval stage lives in the nests of bees and wasps, scavenging its way through waste products but also turning carnivore eating the larvae of its hosts.

This is our first visit to the High Peak since before lockdown and we’re on our regular circular walk between Hope and Castleton.

We see are a couple of fresh-looking red admirals, half a dozen meadow browns and a blue dragonfly with a greenish thorax hawking back a forth over a little backwater pool on the bend of this stream, Peakshole Water, downstream from Castleton.

But it wasn’t just us watching insects, unknown to me as a photographed this valerian further downstream at Hope, the insects were watching us. When I downloaded the photograph I spotted this wasp, which must have been hovering within a couple of feet of me, with a ‘what are you doing?’ expression on its face. So rather like the lamb I attempted to photograph stealthily earlier on.

sketches

We’re walking rather than sitting and sketching, but I do get a chance to try out my new pen, a Lamy nexx an EF nib, as we wait for lunch at the Castle Inn.

Early Bumblebee

early bumblebee

This Early Bumblebee, Bombus partorum, was making brisk work of checking out the chives flowers in the Horbury Library garden. It’s one of our most widespread and common bumblebees. The queens emerge in March.

Tree Bumblebee

tree bumblebee

There’s a bit of a battle going on this morning at the tree bumblebee nest in the corner of our roof. A pair of bees drops to the ground, locked in combat.

I’m guessing that another species of bumblebee is raiding the nest but I don’t get enough of a look at it to identify it. My impression is that it is redder than the tree bumblebee and has just one band, so I’m wondering if it was a species of cuckoo bumblebee.

Must keep my mobile phone handy next time I’m working in the front garden.

Every Flower Counts

results

With ‘No Mow May’ drawing to a close, it’s time to count the flowers that have sprung up on our front lawn. I throw a small chunk of wood over my shoulder to randomly select my square metre sample.

Results: 8 daisies, 2 common mouse-ear and 75 germander speedwell flowers.

Plantlife calculate that, taking this as an average for my 14.4 square metre lawn, the flowers are producing 1.7 milligrams of nectar per square metre, enough to support 2 bees across the entire lawn.

Let’s hope that I can improve on that with next year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey.

Butties

Butterflies cartoon
Roger hard a work

I thought that I’d give my laidback lepidopterist friend Roger a bit of a challenge with his birthday card this year. This is going to be difficult if you’re not familiar with British butterflies, so answers at the foot of this post.

And if that isn’t enough here are four bonus species – all different species of a group of small butterflies that hold their forewings at an angle above their hindwings, so they look a bit moth-like.

more butterfly cartoons

Answers

Top cartoon, back row, left to right: Red Admiral, Purple Hairstreak, Painted Lady
Front row: Small Tortoiseshell, Purple Emperor, Comma, Small Copper

Bonus species, left to right: Large Skipper, Small Skipper, Dingy Skipper, Essex Skipper (and yes, as Roger pointed out, Dagenham is no longer in Essex, it became a part of Greater London in 1965!)

I didn’t get around to including the Chequered Skipper, shame about that.

When Moths turn Bad

moth cartoon

My friend John Gardner, celebrating his birthday today, has built up an impressive list by running an ultra-violet light moth trap in his garden. Hopefully these reprobates haven’t turned up.

clothes moth

Moths have a bad name in my brother Bill’s childhood writing. He wrote this damming indictment aged six and it’s survived in a school exercise book from his infant school days.

Manic Moth

clothes moth

We all know that moths are the unsung nightshift of ecosystem services, busy pollinating and recycling while we sleep, so these days it’s not often that one of them, in this case the humble clothes moth, gets to play the pantomime villain.

Another illustration for the PG-rated children’s storybook Yes it is, or OH NO IT ISN’T! in this case. Manic Moth: “Oh! Yes it IS!!!!“

I thought that I’d nailed it and created a moth that looked as scary as Nosferatu the Vampire but coming back to it he’s more closely related to Peter Firmin’s Nogbad the Bad. I think it’s to do with the way he walks, which would work well as a cut-out animation.