mostly bug blog

Green for creature names (eg. rubber ducky isopod)

Pink for creature locations (eg. my terrarium, one day)

Blue for time of year/day (eg. summer??)

Hornets, from a mildly nervous but interested distance.

These are most likely European hornets, Vespa crabro. They are the largest of the eusocial wasps (which means, wasps that are very social and live in colonies, rather than solitary wasps such as the field digger wasp, Mellinus arvensis).

Hornets love sweet things like fruit, and also tree sap. They also have a good appetite for aphids, so they can also help to protect plants from damage. Another thing they have an appetite for is bees, with some species (such as Asian giant hornets, Vespa velutina) apparently being able to eat up to 50 honeybees a day (some bees are however learning to fight back).

some miscellaneous bug photos

from the top left to bottom right, they are:

1. Common backswimmer, aka water boatman, Notonecta glauca: they use their long hind legs as oars to swim upside down under the water's surface. They hunt insects, tadpoles, and even fish, by sensing their vibrations in the water.

2. Some kind of cranefly, maybe Tipula oleracea or Tipula paludosa. The one photographed here is a male; the females have a longer, pointier abdomen for laying eggs (an ovipositor). I find these in the bathroom quite frequently.

3. Some kind of green or blue bottle fly, which are both kinds of blow fly, Calliphoridae.

4. This was rather hard to indentify since there are so many small black beetles, but it might be some sort of dung beetle or Aphodius rupfipes, a type of scarab beetle. I found it in the bath, if I remember right.

5. A European garden spider, also known as garden cross spider, crowned orbweaver, cross orbweaver, orangie, and Araneus diadematus. They can be identified by the white cross on their back. Their colouration can vary from orange to brown to almost black.

Some bumblebees feeding on globe thistles. These are some of my favourite bee photos I've taken.

This is a glow-worm larva. At the time, I'd never seen a glow-worm larva before, so it was a cool find. The photo isn't the best, but I still love it.

Despite their name, glow-worms are actually beetles, with the females closely resembling the larvae while the males look more like typical beetles. You can tell the females apart from larvae because they do not have the yellow-orange spots the larvae do.

My favourite thing about glow-worms is that they are bioluminescent, which means that they can produce light. They are one of the few species in the UK that can do this. While the greenish glow is more noticable from females, the males, larvae, and even their eggs produce varying levels of light. The light also serves different purposes based on their point in the life cycle - for larvae, it's a warning to predators, while for adults, it's for courtship.