John C. Writes: Not feeling very energetic yesterday – Monday – morning, I decided to spend an hour or so sitting quietly in the small ‘meadow’ area at the bottom of Sue’s garden to see what invertebrates, if any, would visit the flowers.
It was sunny, but not too warm, with a slightly cool breeze. The first insects I noticed were swollen-thighed flower beetles (oedemera nobilis) enjoying the pollen in the ox-eye daisies. They are easy to identify: both sexes are bright iridescent green but the males have swollen thighs. They seemed to be everywhere! There was a smaller number of another, duller species of flower beetle that I tentatively identified as oedemera lucida.
A lot of hoverflies – most of which I couldn’t identify – were also visiting the daisies, including a large bumblebee mimic volucella bombylans, which is one of the easier ones and quite common.
Lower down in the grass several small solitary bees were visiting black medick flowers. They were moving quite fast but I managed to get some photos and eventually, with the help of Peter Creed’s book, we tentatively identified them as Wilke’s mining bee, Andrena wilkella, although we can’t be one hundred percent sure without an expert.
Some small spiders appeared. One, probably a species of crab spider, sat in a daisy flower, presumably waiting for its lunch to arrive. Other notable arrivals were a common blue damselfly (a long way from water) and a tiny (5 mm long) tapering red and black, apparently wingless insect which later turned out to be one of the rove beetles, possibly Tachyporus hypnorum (or similar) which lives amongst mosses.
In the end, the hour turned into an hour and a half, but it was quite productive and just shows what you can see if you’re happy to wait (and let the grass and flowers grow).
John Cobb 28 May 2024
PS Sue’s population of Speckled bush crickets seems to be thriving – she has found more than a dozen first or second instar nymphs at various places in her garden.
WEST OXFORDSHIRE FIELD CLUB 