April 2020 - Bees

I was casting round for inspiration for this month’s column and thought I’d wander out and see what was in the garden.  I almost immediately found half a dozen bees, so I’ll indulge myself with yet another column about my favourite subject.

The first bee I saw was a solitary bee – the hairy-footed flower bee, a female one to be precise. 

Female Hairy-footed Flower Bee

The Facebook groups have been full of pictures of male hairy-footed flower bees which emerge earlier than the females and they are the ones with the hairy feet.  This female was foraging on some red dead-nettle on my neglected vegetable plot and on some dwarf comfrey that is now in flower and threatening to invade the vegetable patch yet again.  Despite the meaningless name (all bees are flower bees because they all eat pollen), hairy-footed flower bees are mining bees and dig their nests underground. 

Male Hairy-footed Flower Bee - Check out those hairy feet (legs)

On the same comfrey patch I found a buff-tailed bumblebee worker – the first of the year.  She was quite small and collecting pollen which means that she was one of the first workers to emerge from the first batch of eggs laid by the queen.  In another part of the garden I found a buff-tailed bumblebee queen.  That queen was searching for a nest and so must have emerged later than the queen that founded the colony that the worker was from.  Confused? Then I’ll just quickly run through the bumblebee life cycle again.

As a bumblebee colony matures (from mid-summer to late autumn) both males and queens are produced.  Males and queens mate (preferably with ones from different colonies), the males die and the queens hibernate.  When they emerge in the spring, the queens feed themselves up on pollen and nectar to develop their ovaries, then they go looking for a nest.  Old mouse holes or bird nesting boxes that didn’t get cleaned out are perfect because bumblebees can’t dig or carry large chunks of nest material about.  When she finds a suitable nest, she makes a wax pot and fills it with nectar which will keep her energy levels up while she creates brood chambers and lays eggs in them.  The eggs hatch into larvae (the bumblebee equivalent of caterpillars), she feeds the larvae with nectar and pollen.  When big enough, the larvae pupate (pupa = chrysalis) and shortly after emerge as the first batch of workers.  Once the workers have emerged, the queen stays at home, creating brood chambers and laying eggs while the workers feed the next batch of larvae.  The colony will go through several cycles as each batch of workers emerge and the size of the workers increases each time because more workers means more food.  Eventually, the queen starts to lay male eggs as well as female eggs and the females (queens) and males will go off and start all over again.  (The original queen and any workers still alive will then die.)

Early Bumblebee Worker

I also found an Early Bumblebee Queen.  More confusion here – Early refers to the species of bumblebee – Bombus pratorum to give it its Sunday name – not necessarily to the fact that they emerge particularly early.  They are sometimes given the name Spring Bumblebee, not just because they emerge in the spring, but because the colony has a short life cycle and so the colony has ended by late spring. 

The early queen was foraging on our flowering currant bush.  For some reason, bumblebees and some solitary bees are particularly fond of flowering currant pollen.  Experiments with captive bees have shown that they will eat flowering currant pollen in preference to other pollens, even though it has been separated from the flowers.  If you want to recognize the early bumblebee, then look for yellow stripes (maximum of 2) and a gingery red tail.  They are also Britain’s smallest bumblebee.  Not only are they the smallest, but when I used to collect pollen, I could rely on the early workers because they carried huge lumps of pollen out of all proportion to their size.  Perhaps that’s why their colony life is short on the basis of ‘eat fast and die young’.

March 2020

I noticed something curious the other day.  There was a flock of gulls on the field at the back and they were all facing the same way.  There were a couple of magpies there also facing the same way as the gulls.  I then realized that whenever I see a small flock of birds on the field, they invariably face the same way – up the field towards Pett Road.  Is there a reason for this behaviour?  It could be that they are facing the prevailing wind, though they are facing South rather than South-west in the main.  It is possible that it has something to do with feeding, though I can’t think why they would be more successful in one direction rather than another.  If they were facing the sun then the direction would change from morning to evening.  Perhaps the slope on the field means their head is nearer the ground making feeding less energetic.  My theory, for what it’s worth, is that it is part of their escape plan.  If disturbed, they would be flying towards open sky, whereas if they were facing the other way, there are large trees and a hill facing them.  Whatever the reason, I will keep an eye out to see if it applies to all species or just gulls and magpies.  Maybe if I got closer to the ground to take a bird’s-eye view it would be informative.  So, don’t worry if you see me lying face down on the field, occasionally changing direction, I’ll just be working out an escape route.

As I write this storm Dennis is approaching and the wet weather continues.  At least it’s not as cold as 2018 when we had the Beast from the East to contend with, though last year scientists predicted that this year could be even colder.  So far that hasn’t happened and there are signs out there that spring isn’t that far away.  We have snowdrops and daffodils in flower and that ever reliable harbinger of spring, the lesser celandine is just in flower.  Of course, spring will happen whether there are harbingers or not, though exactly when seems less predictable these days.  If I was a real scientist, I would note when the first snowdrop appeared, and when the first daffodil opened and when I saw the first bumblebee, etc.  If I did that I would be called a phenologist – someone who studies the timing of natural events.  As it is, I know that snowdrops are traditionally due to flower on or about the first of February, and this year I think that they flowered round about that time.

Phenology is an important science as it shows how things change on a longer timescale.  It has become an important indicator of the effect of global heating, for example, and is closely linked with monitoring extinctions and new colonizers like the ivy bee I have mentioned before in this column that have only been seen here this century. 

Nowadays citizen science is growing in popularity and more people than ever before are recording sightings from the natural world, so that there are now huge databases showing what was seen, where, when, and how many.  The Sussex Wildlife Trust uses iRecord.  This is an online facility that anybody can use to enter their sightings as well as to search and explore what other people have found.  I use it a lot and each sighting is verified by experts which all helps to improve your identification skills.

February 2020 - Wildfires and Caterpillar Fungus

Wildfires in Australia are much in the news as I write this, and they will still be burning when I write this column next month.  At least 25 people have died in the fires and thousands are now homeless.  That is tragic enough but the scale of destruction is many orders of magnitude greater for the wildlife affected by the fires.  It has been estimated that more than a billion animals may have perished already.  Bushfires have been a fact of life in Australia for thousands of years and a unique ecology has evolved, not only to cope with fires, but to thrive on them.  I have seen grass trees bursting into leaf when all the rest of the vegetation around them is blackened, and some species of eucalyptus trees will not germinate until the seeds have been charred.  There is even a beetle that can detect infra-red radiation and will seek out burned areas to eat the resulting corpses.  But that ecology has developed to cope with occasional fires that blow through relatively quickly one area at a time.  The current fires are on a different scale altogether where several join up and become large enough to create changes in the weather.  On this scale, even animals that can run or burrow their way out of danger will have no habitat to return to and will probably starve as a result.  The loss is not just about the larger animals, the destruction of insect life, and the detritivores that live in the leaf litter, even the microbes in the soil will have been wiped out.  I have seen several posts from researchers studying particular species such as velvet worms and grasshoppers who are unable to enter the habitats they are studying and suspect that their study subjects may now be extinct.

The cause has been firmly established as global heating, a fact that the Australian government will eventually have to accept however reliant they are on their coal-based economy.  Perhaps the general population will also see that driving V8 cars and screaming about in powerboats is no longer acceptable behaviour.

Closer to home, we are not yet affected by wildfires to any great extent but we are in the middle of one of the wettest winters I have ever experienced and major floods and droughts are becoming commonplace.  All of these are predicted by climate change models and not a week goes by without reports of new records being broken, whether that be ocean temperatures, wind speeds, or atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

I am concerned that the wet winter may have affected many species of hibernating insects.  The ground has been waterlogged for many weeks now and the bumblebees, solitary bees and wasps may not survive it.  Insects hibernating underground have to try and choose ground that will not get washed away or flooded or too frozen.  Even if they manage that, places that stay damp can harbour species of fungus that invade their bodies and eat them from the inside.  There is a particular genus of fungus called Cordyceps that invades and even changes the behaviour of insects.  There are hundreds of different species and each one targets a different species of insect.   They can attack both active insects like ants as well as hibernating insects such as beetles.  There is a particular species called Cordyceps militaris that is found throughout the northern hemisphere and is commonly known as the caterpillar fungus.  If you see some bright orange club-shaped fungus (Cordyceps means club-headed) sticking out of your lawn, then if you dig it out carefully you may find the remains of a caterpillar at its base.  This is gruesome for the caterpillar, but looking on the bright side the mycelium is very nutritious for us humans and has many vitamins as well as cancer suppressing properties, not to mention its reputed effect on male performance.

My apologies if you ere expecting a picture of a grass-tree.  I need to go back to 1999 and find the right slide.

January 2020 - Thrushes, Re-wilding

We saw a couple of thrushes on the field at the back recently.  They were quite a distance away so it was difficult to see what sort of thrushes they were even with binoculars.  There are four possibilities for thrush-like birds in this country – song thrush, mistle thrush, redwing and fieldfare.  (The thrush family – Turdidae - is a large family that includes robins, redstarts, wheatears and our more familiar blackbird.)  The redwing and fieldfare are more numerous in the winter as they are joined by immigrants from Scandinavia, but these are distinctive birds – the fieldfare is well marked and has a grey back, and the redwing has a distinctive eye stripe.  The thrushes on the field were not so distinctive which meant they were either mistle thrushes or song thrushes.  The mistle thrush has slightly bolder speckles on its breast and a more upright stance.  I could see both of those characteristics so I guessed at mistle thrush.  This was confirmed when they flew off and I saw a flash of white under their wings.  The four thrushes each have a patch under the wing near the shoulder – which could be called an armpit if there no ornithologists about – that is diagnostic.   The fieldfare and mistle thrush both have a white patch, the song thrush has a buff-coloured patch and the redwing is aptly named.

Song Thrush

Fieldfare  (This one found in its summer residence - Sweden)

Wildlife can be difficult to see as it is, quite rightly, wary of humans.  I saw a book recently that addresses that problem.  It is by Simon Barnes and is called Rewild Yourself.  The theme of the book is things you can do in your garden to attract wildlife.  Rewilding is becoming a popular concept if not a popular way of managing land.  The idea is that larger mammals or predators are introduced to an area which then changes the ecology and allows nature to recover from human intervention.  It is a ‘stepping back’ from nature and is the polar opposite to conservation which seeks to preserve what may already be a degraded habitat.  The Knepp estate in West Sussex and Yellowstone Park in the USA are famous examples of rewilding.  Yellowstone has been hugely successful.  Wolves were reintroduced and the water quality improved!  How so?  Basically, the wolves killed the deer that were overgrazing riverside habitat which meant that the deer couldn’t graze where they could be easy targets.  This allowed trees and bushes to grow, which in turn attracted beavers that built dams which slowed the rivers and allowed fish to thrive and a balance was restored that improved the water quality.  It has had other benefits as well.  Trees and bushes have stabilized the riverbanks and reduced soil erosion, and remarkably, pronghorn deer that were becoming rare are now thriving as there is more grazing available due to the reduction in red deer numbers. (Red deer are called elk in the USA by the way.)  The trees and bushes meant more insects, more birds, and more small mammals and more birds of prey.  This process whereby the introduction of a species at the top of the food chain has a dramatic effect on many other species is called a trophic cascade.

The Knepp estate in West Sussex has had similar success.  No top predators there but free roaming cattle, pigs, deer and ponies have created a mosaic of different habitats that have resulted in thriving populations of purple emperor butterflies, turtle doves and nightingales in little more than a decade.  It’s on our list for a visit in the near future.  Meanwhile we’ll just have to carry on working on our own small patch where just allowing the grass to grow allows a lot more species to get a foothold.  I guess wolves and bears aren’t an option here?

Sadly, I find that I don't have any good pictures of mistle thrush or redwing.  Something I hope  to remedy in the near future.

December 2019 - Moths

We’ve had a couple of moths in the garden recently.  Actually, we have probably had hundreds, we just haven’t seen most of them.  The two that I’m talking about weren’t attracted by the moth trap, which we haven’t actually used recently, but were discovered in full daylight.   The first was a moth found early in the morning apparently lifeless, balanced on the door mirror of the car.  A gentle prod made it slide off the mirror, but some instinct made it put out a leg and cling to a tiny ledge at the base of the mirror.  Thus suspended it was easy to lift from the mirror and once on the warmth of the hand it spread the rest of its legs with just the sort of grumpy shrug you may expect from disturbing a teenager before midday.  Once photographed it was transferred to a more natural and secure location to continue its sleep.  The moth in question was a ‘Merveille du Jour’ which even with my limited French vocabulary I could translate as ‘Wonder of the Day’.It is a very pretty and bright green moth that helps give the lie to the idea that most moths are dull because they only fly at night.  The Merveille du Jour does fly at night especially in September and October and we have seen several in the moth trap.  This makes me wonder then, why is the moth so called when there are plenty of moths that do fly during the day with nothing in their name to suggest a daytime habit?

Merveille du Jour - Dichonia aprilina

The second moth that we saw does have a daytime habit and is marveled at by many when it is seen – the humming-bird hawkmoth.  Both moths were seen in the first week of November – the humming-bird hawk-moth on one of the rare sunny days.  It flew up onto the wall of the house in full sunshine and basked there for an hour or more.  When the heat from the sun faded it flew onto the last few flowers of the verbena for a quick snack before flying off.  Humming-bird hawkmoths have been hibernating and breeding in the south-west of the country for a number of years now and we found one a couple of years ago hibernating in our carport which suggests that their breeding range is spreading northwards and eastwards.  The behaviour of this most recent one suggests that it may be doing the same.  The one essential component for breeding is the food plant of the caterpillars which is lady’s or heath bedstraw which we don’t yet have in the garden.

Hummingbird Hawkmoth on Blackcurrant Sage

The adult moths with their long proboscis feed only on nectar and they favour plants that have a deep nectary such as lavender, verbena, and in our garden at least, blackcurrant sage (Salvia microphylla var. microphylla) that has a long flowering period and plenty of nectar.  I found an interesting article recently about humming-bird hawk-moths dying in Bulgaria.  They were feeding on an introduced plant (from America) called white evening-primrose.  This is also known as pink ladies, or pink evening-primrose – Oenothera speciosa.  Apparently glandular hairs inside the nectar tube corresponded with grooves in the proboscis in such a way that the insect is not able to withdraw its tongue.  The insect then exhausts itself trying to escape and eventually dies.  So if you are thinking of planting any white evening-primroses, then please don’t – insects are having a hard enough time as it is.  (I have just discovered that blackcurrant sage is also an import from Central and South America.  Luckily, the moth has no trouble taking nectar from it.)

We are on holiday in the Canary Islands at the moment getting used to a different set of wildlife.  There are plenty of familiar species though – the crow family is well represented with choughs and ravens and we have seen a lot of painted lady butterflies – they really do get everywhere.

The Hummingbird Hawkmoth at rest could easily be overlooked

November 2019 (Crane flies Julia Bardbury Red admiral)

As I write this in mid-October at the end of a couple of very wet weeks, I’ve noticed how quickly things are changing at this time of year.  In the gaps between showers a few of the last house martins can be seen flying high up and presumably feeding themselves up before their long migration.  We have seen a few warblers in the garden as well.  We generally only see them in spring or autumn as they too pass through on their annual migration.  It would be nice to be able to identify which warblers they are, but my bird identification skills allow me to tell the difference between a chiff chaff and a willow warbler only if they are singing, which in autumn they don’t .  I could always fall back on the not very reliable difference that one has darker legs than the other – if I could only remember which one had the darker legs.  There are also a number of other warblers that look very similar, so I’ll just have to be content with the fact that they are warblers and be happy that they’ve chosen our garden for a pre-flight meal.

At this time of year there is also a marked reduction in the number of insects around.  There was a brief flurry of activity at the start of the month when all the crane flies emerged and flew around bumping into things. 

Unidentified Crane Fly - possibly Tipula vernalis

Spotted Crane Fly - Nephrotoma appendiculata possibly

The adult crane flies only live for 10 to 15 days and most do not eat.  Their only purpose is to mate and lay eggs to ensure the next generation of their larvae which are well known to gardeners as leather-jackets.  Whilst they do eat the roots of plants, and in large infestations may kill plants, they are generally beneficial by eating decaying plant matter and increasing soil bacteria.  They also provide food for creatures higher up the food chain such as blackbirds, starlings and the increasingly rare hedgehog.

We went to a very interesting talk by Julia Bradbury as part of the Rye Arts Festival, who talked about creating a wildlife garden.  She believes that letting nature take its course is a way of dealing with many problems in the garden.  She cited an example where some of her plants had a greenfly infestation.  Next to them was a patch of umbellifers that attracted hover flies.  The hover flies laid eggs on the greenfly infested plant and within days the greenflies had been eaten by hover fly larvae.  I read recently about an eminent scientist who specialized in fungus infestations on barley.  He quickly realized that fighting nature was pointless since whatever the problem, nature had the resources to deal with it.  He developed a strain of wheat by sowing a high yielding variety with a disease resistant variety.  He collected the crop and then sowed it again without separating the varieties, and repeated it year after year.  The resulting mongrel crop always produced a good yield and never had any serious diseases.  He contrasted this with the poor nutrition, high yield monoculture crops that are regularly wiped out by various infestations and over the years produced no better yield than his mongrel crop.  His strain(s) of wheat are now much sought after by bakers because of their better taste and higher nutrition.

But going back to my time of change theme, at this time of year there are many fewer insects around.  This is not the decline that Extinction Rebellion are trying to draw attention to – I say trying because it appears that the powers that be are still not listening – but rather the natural disappearance of insects as they hibernate or continue their generations as eggs that will hatch in the spring.  One exception seems to be the red admiral butterfly which I have seen several of in recent days. 

Red Admiral - Vanessa atalanta

The red admiral hibernation is not as complete as the brimstone or peacock butterflies so if the weather is mild enough they will emerge for a quick snack on whatever flowers are still around.  (I have been pleased with a new wildflower meadow that I sowed late in the year – about mid-July! – which has also flowered late and is now providing cornflowers and mallows for late-flying pollinators.)

October 2019

I found a new fly last month.  It was sitting on a wild carrot flower and there was something striking about it that made me get the camera and take some photographs. 

Ectophasia crassipennis

When I opened up the Facebook group to try and identify the fly, there was a picture of an identical fly with the comment ‘This is the 8^th or 9^th record we’ve had this year – mostly from Devon and Cornwall and one from Sussex.  It is new to the UK this year.’  So my fly was only the 9^th or 10^th record for the UK and the second for Sussex.  The fly goes by the name of Ectophasia crassipennis.  It doesn’t have a common name.  Its traditional range has been in southern Europe and the warmer parts of central Europe but it now appears to be expanding its range, or moving its range farther north due to the acceleration of global warming (which is now often called global heating to emphasize just how serious it is).

The fly Ectophasia crassipennis, is a tachinid fly.  This is a large group of flies (about 270 species in the UK) that parasitize other species.  They are parasitoids, rather than parasites – the difference being that parasitoids kill or fatally weaken their hosts whereas parasites take resources from their hosts but don’t kill them (like the stylops I described in a previous Nature Notes).  Some tachinids parasitize butterfly or moth caterpillars, but this species parasitizes hemiptera, for example, shield bugs.  They lay their eggs on the back of the insect where they can’t be reached and when the larvae hatch they burrow into the insect and eat it from the inside.

Tachina grossa

Incidentally, on a recent trip to Braunton Burrows in Devon to survey bumblebees we found another tachinid fly – Tachina grossa – it is the biggest and ugliest fly I have ever seen, as big as a bumblebee and being black and hairy, also resembles one.  That particular fly lays eggs on hairy caterpillars like the oak eggar moth with eventually fatal consequences for the moth.

I seem to have seen more hornets in the garden recently.  Normally we get the occasional one preying on the wasps eating windfall apples, but recently I have regularly seen one hunting round our meadow area.  A week or two back we put out the moth trap to see what late summer species were about.  Imagine my surprise when I looked in the trap the following morning and found more than a dozen hornets in there.  This made emptying the trap a much more hazardous task than usual.  They were all a bit dopey and most flew off as I pulled the egg boxes out.  A couple of them ran out of energy and subsequently died, but judging by the moth wings in the bottom of the trap, none of them had gone hungry during the night.  Seeing so many hornets, as well as the hornet rove beetle I described in last month’s column, suggests that there was a colony nearby, possibly in the wooded area at the bottom of Elm Lane as that is the direction I have seen them fly off in.

European Hornet - Vespa crabro

September 2019

Green Shieldbug nymph

It’s been a busy month in the insect world as you would expect at this time of year and we’ve seen many new species – new as in insects we haven’t seen or noticed before.  The hemiptera have been well represented – this group of insects, as the name suggests have half the wing membranous and the other half hard like a beetle.  Shield bugs are typical hemiptera.  We have seen Hairy Shield-bug, Green shieldbug and a Black-kneed capsid bug.

There have also been a couple of tiny ones that only have latin names so I won’t bore you with those.  I found one hemipteran bug called an Ant Damsel bug which looks like an ant but isn't one that I didn’t know existed until I looked on a Facebook Group to identify the others.

The pond has attracted 5 species of dragonfly, and one or two emperor dragonfly females have been laying lots of eggs in the pond, so that bodes well for future years.  The moth trap has given us at least 3 species that we’ve not seen before as well as a mayfly, an hemipteran bug and two new beetles.

Ant Damsel Bug nymph

Mayfly - Cloeon dipterum

Hairy Shield-bug nymph

The most interesting beetle was called a Hornet Rove Beetle.  Rove beetles are the sort of radical wing of the beetle party and choose not to look like beetles at all.  They don’t bother with wing cases to cover the whole of their abdomen and could easily be mistaken for an earwig.  The wing cases are very short (typically less than a third of the length of the abdomen) so that the wings have to be folded up to fit into the small space.  These obviously take longer to deploy than normal rigid wings which perhaps explains why rove beetles tend to run rather than take flight.  Probably the best known type of rove beetle is called the Devil’s Coach Horse. 

Devil's Coach Horse (Staphylinus olens) in threat pose

This is a fearsome looking insect with powerful mandibles and will raise its tail in a threatening scorpion-like manner should you approach it.  If you ignore the threat it will give you a painful bite and probably emit a foul odour from the white scent glands on its tail.

The Hornet Rove Beetle is a similar looking insect – in fact, I thought it was a devil’s coach horse at first.  It is however much broader and stockier than the devil’s coach horse and used to be very rare, but as hornets are extending their range, so are the hornet rove beetles.  This is because the hornet rove beetle spends most of its time in hornet nests where they feed on the detritus inside the nest and are presumably tolerated by the hornets for providing this clean-up service.  It is a strong flier with a keen sense of smell (which enables it to find hornet’s nests in the first place) and when it runs out of food in the hornet’s nest it can fly considerable distances in search of other insects and invertebrates.  It does this extra-mural foraging at night which explains how it ended up in the moth trap.

And for those who think I don’t get out enough – I found a very interesting fly in Philippa’s garden.  Whatever the bush is called that it was found on, it must be a very good nectar source because it had attracted a large number of flies.  This particular fly is one of the picture-winged flies that often have interesting markings on their wings – in this case the wings were rather plain but it did have rather striking stripy red eyes.  It goes by the catchy name of Physiphora alceae.

Hornet Rove Beetle -  Velleius dilatatus

Picture-winged fly - Physiphora alceae

Black-kneed Apple Capsid - Blepharidopterus angulatus

Miridius quadrivirgatus

Stenodema (Stenodema) laevigata

August 2019

Meadows are becoming very popular, if not to say fashionable at the moment.  A recent Gardener’s World special program was all about meadows.  They highlighted the 97% decline in wildflower meadows since 1945 due to changes in farming practices to feed the baby-boom generation.  The decline in wildflower meadows is associated with an equally dramatic, though slightly delayed decline in insect species.  The programme went on to suggest ways of incorporating wildflowers into your garden as well as planting cultivated flower meadows.  Another highlight was the concept of ‘Coronation Meadows’.  This was introduced by the Prince of Wales to try and slow the decline in pollinating insects.  It is a concept worth exploring as there is a coronation meadow in each county that can provide seeds for recipient meadows in the same county.  Our local coronation meadow is Coach Road Field in Battle.

We have had our own wildflower meadow for several years now (if you can call 20 or so square metres a meadow) which changes not only through the seasons, but also year by year.  It was created by simply letting the grass grow.  Species like bird’s-foot trefoil, red clover, common vetch and self-heal appeared almost immediately, but others like ox-eye daisy and wild carrot have taken longer to get established.  We have tried adding various species to improve the variety but only ox-eye daisy and snake’s-head fritillaries have taken with any degree of success.  Gradually, however, the areas that have no flowers are shrinking as the grass is pushed back.

Wild Carrot - Daucus carota

At the moment wild carrot and ox-eye daisies are dominant – wild carrot being perhaps the most attractive species with its lacy white heads.  It is the heads that gave it the name Queen Anne’s Lace when it was introduced to the USA  (Though there is some uncertainty about which Queen Anne is so honoured – Denmark also had one).  The red spot in the centre of the head supposedly represents a drop of blood from when Queen Anne pricked her finger lace-making.  The wild carrot exemplifies the purpose of the meadow in attracting lots of insects.  We get lots of pollen beetles (tiny black beetles that can be found on almost any flower), iridescent green ‘thick-kneed’ beetles, and soldier beetles (probably Cantharis species, otherwise known as bonking beetles!)  I have also seen solitary wasps, weevils, butterflies and many different flies.  Because the individual florets are small, the nectar is more easily accessible and doesn’t need the specialized tongues of bees and butterflies so those species tend to go to other flowers where there is more nectar but it is only available if you have the right equipment. 

Sharp-tailed Beetle, so far unidentified

Among the more interesting finds on the wild carrot were a number of sharp-tailed beetles that have so far resisted attempts at identification and the photos have by now hopefully reached the Natural History Museum.  They could be rare – watch this space.  Another find was Misumena vatia – please excuse the scientific name, as far as I know it doesn’t have a common name.  This is an ambush spider that is almost pure white, though it can be pale pink or pale green depending on the colour of the flowers that it sits on. 

Female Misumena vatia with prey and mate

As the word ‘ambush’ suggests it sits on flowers blending into the background waiting for pollinating insects to come along which it then jumps on – no web required.  The spider that I saw was a large female that had just sunk its fangs into a large blow-fly.  On top of the spider’s abdomen was another spider, a male Misumena vatia that was clearly using the fact that the female had her mouth full for a safe mating opportunity – a completely new meaning for ‘safe sex’!

The wild carrot plant – Daucus carota – has leaves and roots that smell faintly of carrots, and the young roots are edible and taste of carrot.  This is not so surprising because one of the cultivars of wild carrot – the subspecies D. carota sativus - is the carrot you can get in any supermarket and which also attracts insects – especially the carrot root fly.

Daucus carota sativus - the humble carrot, variety unknown - from the Coop.

July 2019

Yesterday I saw two swifts.  It is only the second time I have seen swifts this year, the worst year since we moved here.  Swifts are in serious decline as highlighted on BBC’s Springwatch recently.  They suggested that part of the reason for the lack of swifts this year has been bad weather in Spain that has delayed or interrupted their migration.  Another reason for their decline is the dramatic decline in the number of insects.  Swifts feed exclusively on flying insects and stay on the wing throughout their lives except for brief periods to mate and nest.  Martins and swallows also feed on the wing, but they do land to roost as well as to nest and mate.  Their ability to land may also allow them to pick off crawling insects to supplement their diet, something swifts cannot do as they have no claws that would enable them to grip a perch.  Another difference is that swifts tend to fly much higher than swallows or martins when they feed but it’s debatable whether that is a factor in their decline or not.  It will be a sad summer when swifts no longer reach the UK, and that summer doesn’t seem that far away.

I found out something interesting about the bee-wolf (Philanthus triangulum) recently.  The bee-wolf is a solitary wasp – solitary because it doesn’t form a colony like the more familiar social wasps that will ruin your picnic – and is one of a group called digger wasps.  It digs a long burrow in soft sandy soil and will dig brood chambers at intervals along the burrow.  It then goes out and catches honeybees which it paralyzes with its sting and then carries the bee back to its burrow.  It will do that three or four times for each chamber and will then lay a single egg in each chamber.  Note that the honeybees are only paralyzed, not dead because they stay fresher like that.  The egg then hatches and the larva feeds on the paralyzed honeybees – yes, it’s gruesome!  It has been estimated that a typical beewolf burrow will contain up to a hundred honeybees.

Bee-wolf - Philanthus triangulum

I have been reading about the relationships between insects and bacteria recently and how insects use bacteria to aid digestion, and about how bacteria affect the behaviour of insects.  The interesting thing about the bee-wolf is that it can exude a white paste from its antennae which contains a particular strain of bacteria.  The bee-wolf daubs this paste onto the roof of the burrow.  This has two purposes – firstly, it shows which way is out when the next generation emerges from their chambers the following year, and secondly, it passes on that same strain of bacteria to the next generation for daubing on to their burrows.  Bee-wolves are active from July to September and should you wish to see them in action, I can recommend the RSPB Nature Reserve at Dungeness.  There is an area of sandy soil on the right of the track about 50 yards before the visitor’s centre where you can see bee-wolves carrying their prey to their burrows and you can marvel at their strength and their gruesome lifestyle.  Don’t worry about being stung – they are only interested in bees.

Bee-wolf with prey -  you can just see the outline of the bee below the wasp

Incidentally, the bee-wolf used to be a rarity in Britain until the late 1980’s.  They have since expanded their range considerably and are now commonly seen throughout the south and east of the country.  They are common in continental Europe and are known to expand their range during long hot summers.  I guess I could bang on about global warming now but I won’t – maybe next month.

June 2019

As we walked back from the Village Hall recently, we saw a very large egg partly hidden in the grass by the entrance to the church.  There was no sign of any nesting activity, and no sign of any large birds anywhere.  The most likely parent is a greylag goose.  These have been seen flying over the area, and the distinctive thing about their eggs is that they are white when laid but gradually become stained as they age.  This egg was mostly white with some staining and has become more stained since we first saw it.  One theory is that geese could jettison their egg in flight for some reason, perhaps because the bird was ill or injured, or maybe just exhausted.  Apparently, the population of greylag geese in the south-east don’t migrate and are resident throughout the year, but it is possible that it could be from a bird that was returning from its Mediterranean wintering ground to more northerly breeding grounds in say Scotland.  I guess that it’s a mystery that will never be solved, the only certainty is that sadly, this particular egg won’t be hatched. 

I was delighted to see a red kite fly over the garden in the last day or two (mid-May), not least because it gave me a break from digging the garden as it meandered slowly past.  They are magnificent birds and the reintroduction of red kites to the UK has been very successful.  Starting in 1989, young birds were introduced, mostly from Spain, to the Chilterns and to Northern Scotland over a five year period.  Since then there have been several more reintroductions in the Midlands and in Northern England.  Though red kites are now seen regularly throughout the UK, the one that I saw may not have been from a reintroduced population, it could equally well have been a migrant from northern Europe which also has a thriving population of red kites.  Though they are raptors and will take live prey if they get the chance, they are mainly scavengers taking carrion and any other scraps they can find.

Barn Owl (Not the local one, this was seen in Norfolk)

Last year we saw a barn owl carrying prey over to a nest on the far side of the field at the back of the house, and eventually saw one fluffy fledgling sat out on a branch of the tree.  A couple of weeks ago, we saw the barn owl again (or maybe another one) carrying prey in the opposite direction towards Pannel Valley.  No doubt it has a young family to feed somewhere in that direction.  The breeding season is certainly in full swing at the moment and we have seen blackbird and sparrow parents feeding their chicks in the garden.  The sparrows have re-used the artificial house martin nest box I put up a couple of years ago, that has never been used by the martins.  The martins seem to prefer to refurbish their old mud nests, which they are doing at both the front and the back of the house.  The swallows seem to be investigating the carport for nesting, but it always takes them a long time to settle and start nest building.  As in previous years, there are three swallows involved.  We assume that this is a male, a female, and one of last year’s juveniles.  There seems to be no squabbling as between two rival males and so the third bird is probably a family member.  We also assume that it is the same pair that return each year, but that is unlikely as most swallows only survive for about four years, though some have been recorded up to eleven years old.

Swallow chicks from 2012

May 2019 (Stylops, male and female flowers)

I took some photos of solitary bees that were foraging round the garden recently, and I uploaded the photos to a Facebook group to help identify them.  One of them was identified as Andrena scotica commonly known as the chocolate mining bee (from its colour rather than from its diet).  The person identifying it mentioned that it had a Stylops.  I had noticed something attached to the abdomen, but didn't know what it was.  Stylops are a rather gruesome parasitic insect with a bizarre lifestyle.  (Because the lifestyle is so bizarre, Stylops has been used as the logo for the Royal Entomological Society.) They had once been classified as beetles or true flies (Diptera), but are now considered to be in an insect order of their own – the Strepistera, meaning twisted winged.  The larvae hang about on flower heads waiting for a bee to come and pollinate the flower.  They then hitch a ride back to the bee’s nest where they burrow into the bee’s growing larvae.  Once inside the larvae they feed on the insect’s blood and go through several moults until the adult bee emerges, by which time the stylops will be located in the bee’s abdomen.  Male stylops then break out between two of the bees abdominal segments and fly off, but the female stylops stays as a pupa with just her head poking out between two abdominal plates and then emits pheromones to attract a male who fertilizes her using an opening just below her head.  Her larvae will then hatch out and leave through the same opening and drop onto a suitable flower to start the cycle all over again.  The presence of stylops seems not to affect the bee’s ability to fly, or to shorten its lifespan, but it does stop the bee reproducing, which in evolutionary terms means that it loses Darwin’s ‘struggle for life’.

Chocolat Mining Bee - Andrena scotica

Close-up of the stylops - it can just be seen poking out between
2 segments just above the tip of the bee's right wing

I have been reading a lot about Darwin recently.  When he embarked on the Beagle, he considered himself a geologist, though he had been recommended for the voyage by his botany professor who had noticed the talent of the young Darwin.  The botanical work that he pursued after the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species’ is considered at least as important as the work he did on evolution.  It is not surprising that Charles Darwin had abilities in botany as his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin wrote widely on the subject.  (While identifying some of the plant photos that I took in Australia, I came across Darwinia fascicularis – Clustered Scent Myrtle, that was named after Erasmus, rather than Charles).   One of the things that Charles Darwin discovered, was that some plants have separate male and female flowers.  This really surprised me as I thought that people would have known that long before the 1860’s when Darwin found out, especially when people like Linnaeus and Mendel had studied plants so carefully many decades before.

People knew that plants such as primroses had two different types of flower, but nobody had thought to ask why?  Darwin, of course, was doing a lot of asking why, in order to find evidence to support his theory of evolution.  Great experimentalist that he was, Darwin carefully tagged each of one type of flower with ribbons so that he could identify them after they had set seed and the petals had gone.  He found that the tagged ones set seed but none of the others did, thus becoming the first person to identify male and female flowers.  Before this, people had assumed that flowers self-pollinated and that bees visited flowers just for the nectar, they hadn't realized that the flower benefited from the encounter.  For Darwin this supported the essential facet of his theory, the ‘mechanism for change’, without which we wouldn't have all the myriad varieties of flowers that we have now.

Clustered Scent Myrtle - Darwinia fascicularis

April 2019 (Lesser Celandine, nictinasty, Michael Higgins)

In the flowerbed near our front door we have a clump of Lesser Celandine.  It has not been planted there, at least not by us, and is probably the result of a stray seed or a bit of tuber ending up in the soil by some means unknown.  Anyway, it seems happy there and it doesn't clash with any grand garden designs we may have had (we haven’t), so there it can stay.   Lesser celandine (Ficaria verna) is, as the botanical name suggests, considered a harbinger of spring.  It is a member of the buttercup family and is an important forage plant for early emerging bumblebees as well as some early solitary bees and other flies.  It loves shade and in the right conditions will quickly carpet a forest floor with its dark green foliage and bright yellow flowers.  Its leaves and tubers are both edible and mildly toxic, so it is recommended that they are either cooked or dried, which converts the toxins to something more benign, before making a feast of them.  The knobbly tubers also give the plant its other common name – pilewort.

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As a buttercup, they come within the family Ranunculaceae, which comes from the Latin ranunculus for ‘little frog’.  Though I have searched the Internet for a better explanation, the concensus seems to be that it is called little frog because buttercups live near water like frogs do.  There must be a better explanation than that, mustn’t there?

Lesser Celandine closed

Talking of explanations, you may have noticed another feature of lesser celandine – the flowers close by mid-afternoon and don’t open again until the following morning.  There are several plant species that do this, one of the most striking is goat’s-beard, which has the alternative name – ‘Jack go to bed at noon’ because it is never open in the afternoon.  Apparently there are some specialist cells at the base of the petals in a structure call the pulvinis.  The chemistry of these cells changes so that they swell or contract to move the petals open or closed.  It is thought that this is a response to temperature changes and possibly daylight as well because on cold dull days the petals don’t open at all.  The big question, of course, is why does the flower need to close anyway?  Why not display itself to passing pollinators all the time?  Perhaps the plant doesn’t want to attract pollinators when there is not enough energy from the sun to produce nectar, or maybe it is to avoid damage from sudden frosts.  The fact is that nobody yet seems to know.  Incidentally, the word that describes this process for both petals and leaves is ‘nictinasty’!

The faintly variegated leaf of Lesser Celandine

If you have followed this column for any length of time you will know that I’m always banging on about threats to our wildlife, loss of habitat, pesticides, insect declines, etc.   But it seems that I’m not alone.  I found this quote from a speech at a conference on biodiversity given by Ireland’s president Michael Higgins recently and just had to share it with you.

“Around the world, the library of life that has evolved over billions of years – our biodiversity – is being destroyed, poisoned, polluted, invaded, fragmented, plundered, drained and burned at a rate not seen in human history - If we were coal miners we’d be up to our waists in dead canaries.”