hoverfly – Enviro-Mentalist

I am now obsessed with my close up binoculars (although I have to wonder what the 8x magnification looks like). A lack of nature over the weekend due to poor weather conditions has not stopped me though.

I’ve discovered a red-tailed bumble bee nest at the bottom of the garden. I watched several workers (I counted a maximum of five leaving without returning, but there might be more) coming and going. Most had orange pollen baskets full, although a couple seemed to come back without any provisions. I had a slight hope that the bees might have been the red shanked carder bee because I swear I saw some red hairs on the legs of one of them – but it might just have been pollen dust. I live in hope though and now I know where they live I can keep a watch. There was a different bumble species (possibly white-tailed) visiting the aquilegia and with full yellow pollen baskets, so I’m not sure where my red-tails were foraging.

The fern smut moths seem to be present in quite big numbers now I know what they look like. However, my ID skills stopped short of other micro moths – there was a very white one with black eyes that I have some terrible photos of to help with my ID.
I watched a small orange fly with black spots on its wings (possibly a fruit fly) wait for a small spider to leave the corpse of another fly before moving in, and I saw another fly – probably a hoverfly, sitting on a leaf. I watched it lift its wings up to clean over the top of its abdomen with its hind legs and then clean each of its wings between these legs. The hind legs by the way were black but with a yellow stripe / underside. I mean, how cool is that, watching it carefully smooth each wing in turn between its legs? hoverfly

And, there are so many spiders, many different types. How do you start to tell the difference? I noticed this one, a male Philodromus dispar, a type of crab spider sitting on a leaf. It was still there the next day. It seems to have two legs that are much smaller and thinner than the others. It does move, but it was back again in the same spot the next day.

I haven’t even started on the slugs and snails yet… So much to discover and I don’t even have to go very far.

There was a bit of sunshine on Sunday afternoon, so we grabbed the opportunity to go for a walk around the Country Park. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to see much as the weather had been a bit dull, wet and cold, but I was pleasantly surprised.

At the start of the walk we were greeted by numerous flowers, filling two of our senses with bright colours and heady scents, then we heard before we saw more than one song thrush singing for all he was worth, a female blackcap off to her nest with take out in her beak as well as the always present chaffinches, male and female.

It was, however, the number and variety of insects that surprised me the most considering the weather of the last few days. Although I only saw a couple of white butterflies, the umbellifers (mainly hogweed I think) were flowering away and teeming with life. I saw bees, flies and hoverflies galore, including this really pretty hoverfly that I had never seen before.

There were also a number of insects flitting about in the sunshine that caught my attention. Some of these finally settled on leaves and had the biggest antennae I had ever seen. They looked moth-like, and on googling for info discovered that they were longhorn moths (Nemophora degeerella) – certainly well-named. According to the UK Moths site, the males (which have the long antenna) ‘dance’ in the sunshine in May and June and are quite numerous. These were a first for me however. This picture below shows how long the antennae are – about three times the length of the body.

So, the moral of the story is, there is something of interest whatever the weather.

Tag: hoverfly

More minibeasts in the garden.

A Walk in the Park