Red Admiral at windfall fruit

Any sunny spell of weather these days and you are likely to come across a Red Admiral, basking or  nectaring on flowering Ivy. Red Admirals are generalist butterflies and late flowering Buddleia, Asters or other late blooming bushes will be used too. Red Admirals are also partial to fruit, and rotting, windfall pears or apples attract many individuals. Last week, a pear and an apple tree at a car park provided a glut of food for Red Admirals and wasps alike. About a dozen Red Admirals were around, either feeding on the fruit under the trees, wings closed, or basking on leaves with their wings fully open. Wasps were also feeding on the fruit, but the butterflies were not keen on sharing their table, so every time a wasp got too close the Red Admiral flicked its wings open (top shot) and flushed it out.

A basking fresh individual.

A new bee hotel and its guests

This year I got a new bee hotel, kindly given to me by George Pilkington from Nurturing Nature. What a great present! His bee hotel design has removable wooden sides with glass covering the actual grooves in the wood, so that you can remove the wooden sides and inspect the cells as they are being built, a rare peek into this usually hidden world. It is designed to provide suitable nesting holes for the common Red Mason Bee, Osmia rufa, which would naturally would use holes in masonry or cracks on walls to nest.
  I treated the nest with teak oil before hanging it out in early February (above). The Red Mason Bees took to it quite quickly after their appearance in the garden, and on the 11 of April the first female Red Mason Bee Osmia rufa roosted in one of the holes.

Below, a male here inspecting the hotel (14/04/14)

By the 10th of May the topmost hole had been sealed and the second had a couple of cells already made.

a poor photo showing the row of cells containing a mound of pollen, nectar and an egg laid atop. Each cell has a mud wall separating if from the following one (10/05/14).

Once a hole has been filled with cells the bee puts the final wall to cover the nest. This is the first finished row of cells.

On the 12th of May, I spotted the first beautifully fresh and golden Male Osmia caerulescens, sitting on the conservatory window by the sage. The males have been about about a week now, and females a couple of days. Males are very similar to Osmia leaiana males, but O. caerulescens have a strong preference for sage and hedge woundwort in my garden, while leaiana prefers knapweed.

...and the same day this very old, faded and bald male Osmia rufa  guarding the bee hotel.

A cleptoparasite fly Cacoxenus indagator is also present often around the bee hotel. This little fly, related to fruit flies, parasitises Red Mason Bee nests. The fly will lay eggs on the cell as a bee is provisioning it. Its grubs will feed on it, preventing the development and emergence of the bee (17/0514).

This female Osmia rufa is finishing filling the second hole.

On the 17th of May I also noticed a new bee (so I thought!). It turned to be a wasp, Sapyga quinquepunctata, which is a cleptoparasite of solitary bees including from the genus Osmia, the mason bees. I found this wasp on the nest and surrounding area. It has blue-purplish wings and white spotted abdomen, with curved antennae. Thank you to Ian Beavis who identified it from one of my photos on Twitter.

Another view of the wasp, on the post holding the nest. The wasp is also a cleptoparasite of Osmia and related bees.

The bee hotel today. Four cells have been completed.

Not only the bee hotel makes it easier to observe mason bees, but other bees and their cleptoparasites will also be attracted to it, increasing the chances of observing their development in the nest and interactions. Also to note that a spider, possibly Clubiona sp, has made a home in one of the holes.
Undoubtedly, I will post more on future developments on this bee hotel.

A scarily beautiful ichneumon

This is the largest and most spectacular ichneumon I see in my garden, Pimpla sp. They are parasitoids of moth caterpillars. The females walk jerkily over the vegetation, constantly tapping the surface of leaves with their twitchy antennae searching for caterpillars. Once they find a suitable host, they use their dagger-like ovipositor to hypodermically inject the caterpillar with an egg, which will develop into the wasp larvae. The larvae feeds on the caterpillar's organs and kills it before emerging like an adult wasp. There are over a thousand ichneumon species in the UK, and they are often difficult to determine without microscopic examination. They are also quite tricky to photograph due to their nervous disposition, so I cooled this one in the fridge for 20 minutes before photographing, and it only took a couple of minutes to fly away!

Spring at last!

The last couple of days have seen the temperatures finally rising over the freezing conditions we've had during March and early April. The lovely, milder, sunny weather we had today meant  I had many 'firsts' of the year. Until today this year, I had not seen a butterfly and I had only seen the occasional bees and bumblebees. Today Garden Ants, Lasius niger, were active in the garden, a clumsy female Dronefly enjoyed the sun and walked over the daffodil flowers feeding (above). Two male Anthophora plumipes patrolled around flowers, and even the first female of the year payed a short visit too. The males occasionally fed on wallflowers, hyacinths and wild primroses.
I saw my first butterfly of the year today, a Small Tortoiseshell, unfortunately, could get no photos, as my cat found her before me and chased her away.

This queen wasp, Vespula vulgaris, also first of the year, got in the conservatory.

A Tegenaria with its egg sac on a stilt. It is under the lid of the water butt, so I guess the photo is upside down

A male Anthophora plumipes rests for a few seconds on foxglove leaves.

My cat becomes quite the entomologist when flying insects start to appear. She often alerts me of insects in the garden, but also disturbs them when they try to feed, to my annoyance! Later in the year, she becomes disinterested, and I can relax and watch insects at my leisure.

Loving the ivy

The late flowers of the ivy are a bug magnet in the autumn, when other sources of nectar are scarce. I have posted before on ivy fest season, but today I came across some new ivy visitors in a large ivy just starting to bloom in my local cemetery. Speckled Wood butterflies rarely visit flowers, as they usually feed on honeydew produced by aphids up in trees. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see two individuals feeding on ivy together with a Comma and many Droneflies.

Speckled Wood and Comma

Comma

Dronefly Eristalis tenax

Male wasp

Helophilus

Yellow dung fly?

Food for the queen wasp

Queen common wasps (Vespula vulgaris) are very active at the moment. After emerging from their overwintering sites, the queens must build their paper nests, lay eggs and raise the first batch of larvae. They also need to feed themselves. Wasps do not have long tongues and need accessible nectar or other sugary sources. The wasps in my garden love the spurge for that very reason (above), and later in the season they feed on Fennel and Ivy flowers, which have easy reach nectar. They act as pollinators like bees and hoverflies.
They also like ripe fruit and sap from tree trunks.
 The hunting wasps do later in the season (insects, spiders or scavenged meat from sandwiches or carcasses) is not for the adult wasps to eat but for their carnivorous larvae, which will feed on chewed up meat or insects and exude a sugary substance for the adult wasps.

 I do not really know what wasps are up to in my cherry tree (photos above from 28th and 29th of march). They do not visit the flowers but the emerging leaf buds. Are they searching for the nectaries? I doubt it. The photos show they seem interested in the bud covering leaflets. I'd be interested to hear if you know what wasps are getting out of it.

Loving the fruit

Our apple and plum trees fruit in August, and there are many bugs that love them, some quite surprisingly. Slugs, springtails, woodlice and fruit flies gorge on fallen apples, and comma and speckled wood butterflies feed on blackberries, but recently I noticed a few new characters in our produce. Seven spot ladybirds clustered on overripe plums (we were away and failed to collect them) and honeybees and wasps joined them. The common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) above, kept coming back to feed on a damaged spot on this fallen apple. Sweet, sweet fruit!

7 spot ladybirds and a wasp

honeybee in plum

German wasp hunting a garden spider

Garden spiders have been quite obvious in the garden for a few weeks now, sitting in the middle of their webs waiting for flying insects to get entangled in their sticky threads. Garden spiders are preyed upon by other animals, including wasps - which later in the year, when garden spiders are larger and more powerful, will eat them in return. This German Wasp (Vespula germanica) caught a middle size garden spider, I saw it fly with it and settle on a drain pipe to subdue it. If the wasp stung the spider I do not know, but its abdomen was curled underneath. After giving the spider a good chew and positioning it under its legs, the wasp flew away. Wasps hunt -and scavenge, famously at picnics -  to feed their larvae.

The wasp with its prey just before flying away

A large garden spider with a wasp prey in October 2008

UPDATE 24/08/11: corrected the title, which said common wasp.

Wasp and teasel water cup

 Wasps make their nests of paper which requires mixing chewed wood with saliva, so they need to drink a lot. These wasps, however, were drinking from a risky source of water. The water-filled cups of teasels, where many insects and other bugs drown, and whose juices increase the teasel seed set. Although the unfortunate prey of the teasel might have just happen to fall in the cups, the lure of available water on a sunny day could also be a reason insects are lured to the cups, and many bees and wasps must fall prey to this carnivorous plant (check the wonderful blog Cabinet of Curiosities for an example). These wasps were lucky, they held on, quenched their thirst and flew away.

Feeding, hunting, resting, mating...

Around the summer solstice, the Philadelphus or mock orange blossoms. In addition to its lovely scent, its broad, cup-like white flowers make a beautiful background for insect photography. It is just fitting that insects love these flowers too. The following photos were taken yesterday and today.
Small spiders such as this crab spider (above) sit on the flowers to ambush flying insects attracted to them. Small garden spiders build their webs also amongst the blossom.

A fly resting

Carpet beetle (Anthrenus sp.) feeding on pollen

Greenbottle (Lucilia sp)

Bumblebees often feed on the blossom. Here, Bombus terrestris.

A mating pair of ichneumon wasps

A small bee (Hylaeus?) enjoying the pollen

November bug magnets

I went for a walk this afternoon to re-acquaint myself with my clean and repaired camera. After spending almost three weeks camera-less, it was great to have it back. I just walked back to the spot where a few days ago I spotted the B. hypnorum and waited around the sweet smelling Mahonia bushes trying to spot more bumblebees. There were flies (Bluebottles and a smaller species) and wasps around, but my patience finally paid when I saw the distinctive large and dark shaped of a bumblebee amongst the flowers. Not a B. hypnorum, but a worker B. terrestris, stayed just for a few shots (top).

 The second bug magnet today was Ivy. There were dozens of male wasps feeding on Ivy flowers on the wildlife garden. Their large antenna reminded me of mountain Ibex males. I am not very good identifying wasps, although in a post in WAB today somebody pointed at a very informative webpage to identify them. I will update the post if I manage to get an ID. Around the ivy there were also feeding Bluebottles and a parasitoid wasp.
 The third bug magnet was a non-native bush related to the Ivy, the Fatsia japonica. Here the ubiquitous bluebottles were the only insects around.