Above is a type of digger wasp – the mournful wasp (Pemphredon lugubris). I thought it looked like a flying ant at first, but it has a hammer-shaped head with big jaws, and a waisted body. It is all black – including its legs and antennae. It lives in wooded areas, nests in decayed wood and feeds on aphids.
Winged ants (or alates) appear at different times around the country. Flying Ant Day is when winged males (drones) and virgin queens (princesses) emerge from the nest to mate with partners from different colonies and set up new colonies. The number of Flying Ant Days depends on the weather. It is usually a hot and humid day, or spell. In Cornwall there was a Flying Ant Day a couple of weeks ago on 9August. I heard on Radio Cornwall that ants were swarming and, sure enough, there was a swarm of ants on the lawn next to our patio, and some found their way to the steps leading down to the water meadow, so I could count black garden ants on the tally!
This is the Hairy Shield Bug (Dolycoris baccarum). It has very striking markings and is slightly hairy if you zoom in. New adults emerge from August, and it overwinters as an adult becoming a dull brown colour during that time. It is widespread and can be found in hedgerows and woodland edges. This one was under the willow trees on the left-hand side of the garden.
Google lens told me that this was a dock bug, but it didn’t look like some of the pictures. Then I found a helpful diagram (www.ukwildlife.net) that showed the different stages of development and discovered that this is the final instar of a dock bug.
What is an instar? It’s the term used to describe the stages between moults of the larvae until the final adult emerges. The last stage of juvenile dock bug has small wings and a scaley body visible. The adults have larger wings that overlap their broad scaley body and broad shoulders that look armoured. They lay eggs in the spring. The first instar is red and black and looks quite cute and there are at least four stages of instar, before the adult dock bug emerges from August. Dock bugs don’t mind damp or dry habitat as long as there are docks or related plants for them to munch on.
This is a tortoise bug – another shield bug. It’s different from the hairy shield bug as it is broader and flatter and has two white dots on its ‘shoulders’. The goblet marking is much slimmer and draws into a line up its back. This is the adult. The juveniles have more patterning.
There are two types of tortoise bug, but they are very difficult to distinguish so the Latin name reflects this – Eurygaster cf testudinaria – where cf means ‘likely to be’. The other tortoise bug is the much rarer Eurygaster maura.
It is found in damp and dry grasslands and is currently widespread in southern England, though it used to be uncommon.
The other day when I was wandering around not expecting to see a lot, I saw two kinds of wasp. The usual wasps were busy at work in the willows, but in the cutting just below the bank (that we call ‘Hard Knott Pass’ after one of the hairier passes in the Lake District), I came across this Ichneumon (pronounced Ick Newman) Wasp.
As usual, there are many sub-species of Ichneumonoids, around 2500 in the UK alone. So, I was lucky to find one that was easily identified. The Diphyus quadripunctorius is black and yellow with distinctive white spots on its back and tail. Its name would suggest four spots and I think two might be under the wings. The females are identified by having orange thighs on their back legs and yellow on their antennae. I think this is a male, as although his back thighs look dark, he definitely has all black antennae.
Ichneumon wasps are solitary and nearly all are parasites. The Diphyus lays its eggs in a host, a moth caterpillar, and then the larvae hatch and eat the host, after which they pupate until they are ready to emerge as an adult. They live on the edges of woodlands and in lush grasslands.
The next wasp I saw in the depths of the grasses was a type of sickle wasp Eniscospilus ramidulus. This, too, is a type of ichneumon wasp. It was easy to identify from its orange body and the black tip on its tail. It also has quite distinctive wings. They have a panel with floating pieces of chitin inside. (You can see triangular shapes if you zoom right in). Chitin is the substance that the shell of an insect is made of. I’m not sure why they have such complicated structures in their wings, but I wonder whether it is to make them reflective (?)
They are supposed to be nocturnal, but the males can be found flying during the day as well, which is just as well really, or I wouldn’t have seen it!
This is a different hoverfly to the long hoverfly and the Melanostoma mellinum. It is a Marmalade Hoverfly because of the two moustache-shaped black bands on its abdomen. Some, but not all, have paler bands like this one, or even white bands. It is possibly the most common hoverfly in Britain. It can be found in gardens, parks and hedgerows and loves a sunny spot.
This tiny fly is almost definitely a Lesser Dung Fly, as it has clearly visible dark wing spots, one on each wing. There are many species of dung fly, and it is advisable to identify them with a microscope. However, I didn’t have one handy, so I am relying on the dark wing spots and let’s just say it’s a dung fly that is smaller and less yellow than the Yellow Dung Fly I saw before! They eat what you’d expect a dung fly to eat!
We had clumps of yellow flowers in both the top garden and in the watermeadow. The ones in the top garden turned out to be ragwort, but these (above) are common fleabane. They both have bright yellow daisy-style flowers, but the leaves are quite different. Ragwort has intricate leaves and fleabane has regular ‘leaf-shaped’ leaves, long and pointed and corrugated.
The other difference is the occupants of the plants. Ragwort, which is poisonous to animals, is host to the striking looking caterpillars of the cinnabar moth. If you see a tall, yellow daisy with complicated leaves look for black and yellow striped caterpillars climbing over it. They are an amazing sight!
Our common fleabane, on the other hand, seemed to be a buffet for hoverflies. Long hoverflies. Long hoverflies have a distinctive elongated tubular body-shape. Their body is longer than their wings. Their eyes are reddish brown and their stripes are fairly regular and slightly m-shaped.
Yesterday, I was walking round the garden thinking that it was mild and muggy, but too damp and dull to see anything much. How wrong I was! There were snails, wasps, damselflies, hoverflies, and many small bugs, as well as more butterflies than I was expecting. I was chasing a few things round the garden.
Now I’m getting to the stage where I think “Oh, I’ve got that one!”. I may have missed a brown butterfly or two thinking that they were Meadow Browns, but it’s difficult to tell when they have their wings folded up. Do I wait patiently or go in search of something else?
And another thing – I was mowing the lawn yesterday, before I went down to the watermeadow, and I found myself not only steering round a baby toad but picking blades of grass with ladybirds on to move them out of the way.
A few weeks ago I saw a giant green grasshopper in one of the alder trees, but I didn’t have a camera handy, so I was excited to see another large grasshopper, especially when it turned out to be a cricket. I didn’t even know we had crickets in this country!
The photo isn’t brilliant because it was hiding deep down in the undergrowth, and I didn’t want to push the grass out of the way in case it leapt out of sight. However, you can see the giant legs, tiny wings, and earwig style tail. What does all this mean? The two tail appendages are called cerci and mark this cricket out as a male. The tiny wings with pale edges are also characteristic of the male Dark Bush Cricket. The females either have even tinier wings or none at all.
Dark Bush Crickets can be found in a variety of habitats, except for sandy places, and eat brambles, dandelions, and nettles. We have nettles in abundance and some brambles and dandelions.
It turns out that the Froghopper is the insect that makes ‘Cuckoo Spit’ – it is also known as a Spittlebug. There it is, tucked under that curl of leaf in the picture above.
The froghopper lives on plant sap, which it sucks out after piercing the stem with a beak on its cone-shaped head. The cuckoo spit is a protective layer of foam that the baby froghopper makes from regurgitated sap to protect itself from predators like ants and parasitic wasps. After a couple of weeks the baby froghopper splits its soft skin and emerges as an adult. The adult is well-equipped with a harder skin and wing cases, and it can escape predators by jumping up to 70cm in the air, even though it is only half a centimetre long. The adult froghopper lives for about three months.
There are ten species of froghopper in the UK. The two main ones are the Common Froghopper and the Black-and-red Froghopper, but I believe this one to be an Alder Froghopper. It has a more subtle colouring than the Common Froghopper and distinctive white and clear patches, which mark it out as an Alder Froghopper. I assumed that the Alder Froghopper would prefer Alders, but, in fact, it is happy in a variety of habitats.
This is a female Azure Damselfly. I got excited because I thought it was a Northern Damselfly. But they are an endangered species and limited to the Scottish Highlands. I stared and stared at my photo and various websites trying to identify it.
The female of the Northern Damselfly and the green forms of the Common Blue Damselfly and Azure Damselfly are black with thin pale blue stripes, pale blue legs, and pale green stripes on the thorax (upper body) and head.
Here are the reasons it could have been a Northern Damselfly:
You can just see that there is a thin black spur-stripe from back to fore on the pale green sides of the thorax.
The green stripes on the top of her thorax are thin.
The markings on her pronotum, which is the bit that joins the back of the head to the body, are black outlined in pale green.
The green form of the female Common Blue Damselfly is similar but the stripes on her thorax are wider green and there is no black spur on her green sides.
However, then I found out about the Azure Damselfly, the female of which has similar markings and the shape of the pronotum has a distinctive three-lobed shape. You can just see in the picture that the pronotum, which is black and outlined in pale green, has a scalloped edge. So that confirmed it.
Also, this is Cornwall, not the Scottish Highlands.
This is a male Common Darter. There are three red Darters – the male Common Darter, the Ruddy Darter, which is not really found in the South-West, and the Red Veined Darter, which is a migrant to the South of England. This is the Common Darter because:
it is orange-red, not deep red like the other two; it may have pale leg stripes – it’s hard to see – but they are definitely not black like the Ruddy Darter; and from the picture below you can just make out that it has yellow sides to its thorax, but I couldn’t see any facial markings which would help. Still, I think I have enough clues to be sure that it is a Common Darter.
Flying things are notoriously difficult to photograph and even when they look as though they are settling, you have to be quick as they are constantly moving even in the flowers. There were many bees on the Mallow and Toadflax. This one was distinctly ginger with black stripes. I identified it as a Common Carder Bee.
This is a Melanostoma mellinum hoverfly, one of the most common hoverfly species in the UK. It is found in grassland. It doesn’t have a common name, as we tend to just call it a hoverfly, but the Wildlife Trust says there are over 280 species of hoverfly in the UK. This one has the big-eyed head of a fly in a russet-red colour, and a black and yellow body in W-stripes.
There were wasps round our tall willow. Many wasps. We decided to leave them, as it is better to have them out here than in the eaves of the house. These wasps seemed happy in the environment of the Willow tree.
I took two photos of wasps and noted the different markings. I assumed they were both Common Wasps, just with individual markings. I knew they weren’t Hornets or types of solitary wasps because they had the regular wasp shape and colouring. However, the German Wasp, also common in the UK, has separate dots and thinner stripes on its back, so I think I’ve got one of each here. The German Wasp is above and the Common Wasp is below. The definitive way to identify them is to look at their faces. The German Wasp has three black dots on its face. However, I wasn’t going to get that close to find out!
I haven’t seen a wasp nest in the tree yet and the fact that the two different wasps in the environment indicates that they might have been just visiting. The Common Wasp is on a bindweed leaf near the willow, anyway. So what were they doing? Adult wasps eat only sweet foodstuffs like nectar and honeydew (and sweet picnic foods!). They live for so little time that they only need the carbohydrates to keep going, not proteins for bodybuilding. One source of honeydew is the trail that aphids leave behind them. So it is likely that both these wasps with their heads down to the surface of the leaves, were feeding on honeydew deposited by aphids. And why so many wasps had made their way to the willow tree on a hot, sunny day.
So, what is the point of wasps? Well, wasps prey on caterpillars, spiders and other insects, which they take back to feed to their young. In doing so, they keep the numbers down and balance the ecosystem. Also, in travelling from plant to plant they do their bit towards pollination. So, they do have their uses, after all.
