Category Archives: Wildlife

A Bee and a Plum Pudding

The bees that visit adore these drumstick alliums

This is my pic. I try to plant alliums and purple geraniums for the bees as they love them and the bees need all the help they can get these days. These (allium sphaerocepahlon or round headed leek) flower later than the big ones that we have in the Spring. We get visited by bees with many different coloured bottoms; red, white, yellow and orange, we get small honey bees, large bumble bees, solitary bees. I think there must be lots of bee keepers in Bristol. Sometimes they fall asleep on the alliums and I find them there in the morning waiting for the sun to warm them up.

Brian came out to see if he could take a better shot and the bee flew behind his glasses. He closed his eyes and waited politely till the bee left. He needed pudding though to compensate…

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Transitions

A hot day and everything changes...

These pictures seem to have joined up in some mysterious WordPress way so rather than mess about with it anymore. I’ll just leave it like this. :)

The top one is a ladybird larvae on an outside wall beginning its change…..

I think it is pupating...

The raw...

..and the cooked

Harlequin Ladybirds

Anyone good at identifying ladybirds?

I’ve sent this photo off to the Harlequin survey site, hoping they’ll identify it for us.

We have a dramatic influx of ladybirds on the cardoons. They are very busy, setting up home, reproducing, laying eggs, eating, generally marching about, arguing with the aphids and rarely stay still long enough for the man with the macro lens to get a clear shot let alone measure them! We think they could be Harlequins but only read up about ladybirds and their lifecycle yesterday. We are watching out for the larvae to hatch now….

They arrived in Britain in 2004 and are marching westwards, no ordinary ladybird, bigger and meaner than our native species. I usually pay more attention to birds, like the collared doves who are so successful here, and the rose-ringed parrakeets and the little egrets who now inhabit parks and wetlands respectively. But not usually my garden! The world is in flux constantly and the insect world is no exception….

So the question is, should I be grateful that in three days time their larvae will hatch and proceed to devour all aphids, butterfly eggs and everything else that stands in their path, or should I remove their eggs from the leaves and use dilute soap to wash away the aphids?

It’s National Insect Week next week apparently, so I’d love to hear what’s crawling and buzzing around where you live!

Here are two more of Brian’s wonderful pics…any experts out there want to have a go at identifying them for us? (Contact details for him here if you want to use one of his images)