Sunday July 31

Since my last post the weather has remained largely warm. This has  resulted in plenty of insect activity in the garden.

The huge lavender outside our kitchen window is at last proving a great draw for the local bees, and I have been driven to distraction trying to photograph and identify them. They mostly seem to be Buff-tailed Bumblebees, Bombus terrestris, and I have seen an obvious queen, and a lot of much less obvious workers. In fact it appears to be almost impossible to distinguish the workers of this species from White-tailed Bumblebees, Bombus lucorum, as they both show a largely white "tail", actually the abdomen.

Buff-tailed Bumblebee - queen

Buff-tailed Bumblebee - worker

Another common bumblebee which visits the lavender in good numbers is the Common Carder Bee Bombus pascuorum.

Common Carder Bee

This afternoon, however, I had a bumblebee tick. It's just a pity that its identification is rather tricky. What I do know is that it was a cuckoo bee, and what I think, because it was quite big, is that it is a parasite of the Buff-tailed Bumblebee, a species called Vestal Cuckoo Bee, Bombus vestalis. 

Vestal Cuckoo Bee

In contrast to the bees, it remains pretty hopeless for butterflies and moths. A handful of Gatekeepers, and Large Whites have visited, and I had a brief view of a Holly Blue. The only moth to get through the bathroom window was a micro, which I eventually concluded was a Dark Fruit-tree Tortrix Pandemis heparana.

Dark Fruit-tree Tortrix

Finally, yesterday morning I spotted a cranefly scooting along the kitchen floor. I potted it and took it outside for release and a mugshot. What a stonking beast it turned out to be. All Craneflies are not the same.

Nephrotoma flavipalpis

It doesn't seem to have an English name, and as I am not a latin scholar I can only propose that it be called Yellow-headed Cranefly. Not that anyone's listening.