Flowers are at their most abundant now and picking them as examples of flower shapes to suit a range of different insects’ tongues for a workshop, I realise that I have collected enough to fill a large bucket. Seeing them all packed in together like a florist’s nightmare, in every shape, size and colour, I realise that despite the foraging opportunities their abundance gives my garden, I have seen far fewer numbers of insects this year.
Yet some seem plentiful, like the cinnabar moths in the veg patch. The adults flash red as they lift off from the foliage when I brush past and I see their pyjama striped caterpillars fattening up nicely as they devour more of the ragwort leaves daily.
The garden tiger moths are noticeable too, I see them lying flat on horizontal leaves, seemingly oblivious to the risk of predators, perhaps their defence is in their vivid wing colours. Not so an emerald moth whose soft green colouration must make it easy to hide itself in foliage, but resting by the front door on the white rendered wall doesn’t seem such a good idea. I’ve never seen one before so he was a nice surprise, as was the water scorpion found with, and indeed eating, other species of my pond’s life in a ‘kick’ sample taken yesterday.
There have been unexpected flowery surprises too, like a strangely but beautifully shaped wild carrot and the appearance of opium poppy ‘Lauren’s Grape’ which opened up its lovely silky petals among the runner beans last week, a surprise after complete failure with a packet of seed sown at least three years ago. Also a plant reminiscent of a red stemmed dandelion among a salad mix which, left uneaten, has now matured and is flowering beautiful sky blue stars. Mystery solved, it’s a chicory.
In a tiny community garden in town, we volunteers found a broomrape deep in the undergrowth, a cause for pause and several photos. But the biggest surprise came at the weekend with a swarm of honey bees massing over my pond. I watched as so many swirling little bodies filled the view from a window and as I dithered, torn between wanting to see where they were heading and not wanting to get in their way, like a murmuration of starlings, they dropped suddenly behind a beech hedge to where an old hive has been standing empty after the death of the last colony over the winter.
To my delight, they didn’t just cluster on it but made their way inside and seem to have taken up residence, I had no idea that a swarm would choose to live in a man made hive. What a nice surprise!
