11 a.m.: In a sun trap of a back garden in South Ossett this holly blue is so intent on feeding on a flowering shrub that I’m able to get within macro range with my camera. When I see a blue butterfly the size of my little finger nail I’m never sure whether I’m looking at small blue, common blue or holly blue but, once it settles, the holly blue is the only one that that has bluish white underwings with small dark spots.
The small blue has black spots fringed in white on its pale grey underwing; the common blue has black and orange spots, also fringed in white, on a grey-brown background.
It’s as if someone’s thrown a switch and we’re suddenly in the peak of springtime. In the last two weeks we’ve had a covering of gravel-sized hailstones and just last weekend the crowds were braving wintery showers to cheer on the Tour de Yorkshire cyclists. This morning as we follow the towpath to the Navigation Inn (which is still struggling to get fully up and running after the December floods) we’ve got peacock butterflies and orange tips flying alongside us. Greater stitchwort, dandelion and green alkanet are freshly in flower.
A canal side oak is bursting into leaf and amongst the catkins on its branches we spot a few oak apples, made by the gall wasp Biorhiza pallida. The wingless unisexual generation of this gall wasp has spent the winter developing in galls on the roots of the tree then emerged and climbed the trunk to lay its eggs on the buds. The buds develop into the reddish spongy oak apples and from these the bisexual generation will emerge.
A blue butterfly (holly or small blue?) flies up from the rock face which creates a south-facing sun trap at Addingford Steps. On the River Calder near the old Horbury Bridge woollen mills two male goosanders are diving.
A lapwing swoops over the Strands where I drew in the aftermath of the winter floods. There’s a warbler in the tall grasses. From it’s song Barbara thinks it’s a sedge warbler, from it’s appearance – not streaky – I took it to be a reed warbler. But I’m struggling to get a decent view with my little monocular: I must bring binoculars next time!
Black garden ants, Lasius niger, don’t live indoors but will come in to forage. They love anything sweet. Yesterday morning Barbara spotted a column of them following a trail in front of the kick-board of the kitchen units. They were getting in through a chink in the corner of the skirting board. I filled the gaps with silicon sealant but still the odd ant kept appearing. It looked as if there might be a couple of tiny holes, big enough for a determined ant to squeeze through, so this afternoon I’ve smeared some petroleum jelly along the join and I hope that will discourage them.
I need to take the skirting board off to check what kind of passageway the ants are using behind it, but that’s a job that I’d rather have a joiner in to do. After all the hail and rain that lashed the garden last week we’re now heading into a spell of warmer, settled weather, so I hope that the ant foraging parties will turn their attention to the great outdoors.
“Are you there?” I heard Barbara shouting, “Have I got a bee on my back?!”
No bee in sight: “I was ironing the quilt cover and I heard this buzzing, then it stopped . . . and started again.”
When I helped her fold up the quilt cover earlier we heard no buzzing but the bee must have been trapped in there all the time, narrowly escaping being crushed when we folded the cover and miraculously surviving being flattened by the steam iron. It must have found its way in when the cover was hanging on the clothes line.
We carefully turned the cover inside out and I scooped up the bee in a bug box, none the worse for its adventure.
It buzzed around franticly in the bug box so I sketched it as quickly as possible and snapped away, attempting to take a photograph of it (below).
Field Guide to Bees
Red mason bee in Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland.
This gives me my first opportunity to use my new Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland, by Steven Falk, illustrated by Richard Lewington.
It’s a female red mason bee, Osmia bicornis but from my photographs and very quick sketch, I’d labelled it in my sketchbook as a tawny mining bee. Tawny mining bees make their nests in sandy paths and on bare patches on sunny hillsides but I haven’t seen them in the immediate area however every year I see the mason bees nesting in old walls and cavities in the lime mortar between the bricks in our house wall. We usually have to rescue a few that have found their way into the house.
With apologies for the photography, it was buzzing madly around the bug box.
Despite clearing out so many cocoons last autumn we’re still finding that the odd bee moth is emerging from some hidden corner or another. We’ve had no more than half a dozen appear fluttering around the living room in the last month but recently they’ve been mainly the males so today when I found a female I took a closer look. When I spotted her by the back door, my first thought was that I’d found a snout moth because of the prominent palps projecting at the front, which the male lacks.
Bee moths, Aphomia sociella, feed on old cells and debris in the nests of bumble bees and wasps. Last summer we had literally thousands emerge via cracks in the floor when we had a bumble bees’ nest behind the air brick at the front of the house. They pupated, spinning tough sticky silken cocoons, often bunched together, in every dry, dark corner they could find. We ended up buying a new carpet!
Link:Bee moths make their first appearance in May last year.
8.30 p.m. The brown ants that nest under the paving stones at the end of the drive are running around excitedly on this still, warm summer evening, as they do when the flying ants (the queens and the males) are preparing to take off on their nuptial flights. This activity has attracted a song thrush which is sitting with its tail bent beneath it, enjoying an anting session.
With all the recent ant activity, I was thinking the other day that it’s a long time since I saw this behaviour; in fact this might be the first time that I’ve actually seen it in real life, rather than in a wildlife documentary.
After the song thrush had finished, I went out to take a closer look at the ants and there were no winged ants amongst them. Perhaps they took flight earlier in the day, or perhaps this was a false alarm from overexcited worker ants.
When I first uploaded this post, I identified it as a mistle thrush but the arrow-shaped spots show that it’s a song thrush.
We’ve had record temperatures today and the red-tailed bumblebees in the nestbox near the back door have been making efforts to cool their nest. The bee on the right with its rear end to the nest hole was fanning its wings.
This bee was fanning its wings but so fast that they were visible only as a blur.
Every time that I looked out there was a bee on duty, acting as a fan. The first time I noticed them doing this, at 11 o’clock this morning, there were two vibrating their wings right next to the hole but the colony was so busy that bees returning or emerging kept pushing them out of the way. After that there was only ever one on duty and there would be breaks when three bees emerged at once.
Honey bees have been observed taking water into the hive to help with cooling but I couldn’t tell if the red-tails were doing this.
In the spring we saw blue tits and house sparrows taking an interest in the box. Last year the sparrows ousted a pair of blue tits that had started nesting but the red-tailed bees are definitely in charge this year. Barbara watched them chase off a wasp which was trying to get into the nest.
Bee moths are a little under 2 centimetres long. I think this is a female.
We’ve been noticing little brown moths appearing mysteriously in our living room for the last few weeks, so nondescript that we didn’t even attempt to identify them before releasing them outside. They often appeared by the door so I was starting to suspect that they might be connected with the bumblebee nest behind the now defunct air-brick immediately beneath this corner of the room.
They’re bee moths, Aphomia sociella, the larva of which eat debris such as old wax cells in the nests of bees, which is a useful service for the bee except they will also eat bees’ brood. They pupate in tough silky cocoons, which can be found tucked away as a mass.
Bumblebees are attracted to the tiny flowers of cotoneaster rather than the showy clematis that is climbing over the bush. A smaller, faster bumblebee visits the flowers of aquilegia.
A leaf mine in a bramble leaf maps the life so far of the insect that made it which was probably the larva of a small moth.
We’ve seen blue tits and sparrows taking an interest in the nestbox on the wall just outside the back door but it looks as if this year bumblebees have taken possession.
The rosettes of leaves of ribwort plantain and dandelion are spreading like a colony of green starfishes over the corner of the lawn that gets the most trampling by the shed. The rosettes are ground-hugging so that they escape the blades of the mower, so I try taking some of them out using a tool called a grubber which I push in and rotate to lift out the whole plant, taproot and all.
There’s then a small hole that needs filling with soil. It might be a good idea to spread a bit of grass seed on the bare patch too, but I’m sure that at this time of year the surrounding grass will soon spread to fill the gap.
11 a.m.: In a sun trap of a back garden in South Ossett this holly blue is so intent on feeding on a flowering shrub that I’m able to get within macro range with my camera. When I see a blue butterfly the size of my little finger nail I’m never sure whether I’m looking at small blue, common blue or holly blue but, once it settles, the holly blue is the only one that that has bluish white underwings with small dark spots.
From it’s song Barbara thinks it’s a sedge warbler, from it’s appearance – not streaky – I took it to be a reed warbler. But I’m struggling to get a decent view with my little monocular: I must bring binoculars next time!
