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Garden Highlights 2019

Arthropedia Posted on by

The Garden of Earthly Delights

No review of the year would be complete without mention of our wildlife friendly garden that has given us so much pleasure in the few years we have been here. Each year brings old friends and new delights to add to our ever growing species list.

Bees

With the bee list standing at 60 at the beginning of 2019, I didn’t have particularly high hopes of adding many more. How wrong I was for by the end of the year we had found eight new species and the list stood at 68!

Male Hylaeus signatus on Weld flower spike.
Little and Large – Hylaeus pictipes and Hylaeus signatus together on Weld.

Hylaeus signatus (Large Yellow-face Bee) was amazingly tempted in to the front garden by the planting of a single specimen of Weld – as soon as the flowers opened a male appeared and we had up to 5 individuals. The Hylaeus list is now seven species. New Nomada species were flavoguttata, zonata and flavopicta. 

Nomada zonata. A very scarce species in Norfolk up until 2019 when records increased dramatically. No surprise really as it is a cleptoparasite on the rather abundant Andrena dorsata.
Nomada flavopicta. This species is a cleptoparasite on Melitta bees and is doubtless in the area due to the increase in Melitta leporina after we encouraged more White Clover flowers in the garden.

Best of all was my first ever Heriades truncorum, a bee that I have searched for in its Breckland stronghold several times, only to have it turn up in the garden. (I sometimes wonder why I bother leaving home at all.) It was attracted, as were so many other things, to the one, lone, magnificent Ragwort plant that had self-seeded into the garden. 

Female Heriades truncorum collecting pollen from Ragwort flowers.
My favourite bee – the highly charismatic Anthophora quadrimaculata (a male).
Anthophora quadrimaculata female on Catmint.

I am also pleased to report that we again had good numbers of Anthophora quadrimaculata visiting the garden and were able to make further observations on the foraging behaviour of this charismatic little bee, comparing it with its country cousin, A. bimaculata, which we had found in the Brecks. (See Breckland Bee Surveys in ‘Arthropedia 2019 Review of the Year (Part 1)‘).

Hoverflies

Helophilus pendulus – linocut exhibited at the Society of Wildlife Artists annual exhibition in the Mall Galleries, London in 2018.
We have now recorded three species of Helophilus in the garden – pendulus, hybridis and trivittatus.

The hoverfly tally crept up slightly with Helophilus trivitatus visiting on Jeremy’s birthday (what a treat) and then one of my favourites, Eristalinus sepulchralis, put in a surprise appearance. We also recorded the first Scaeva selenitica in the garden along with the more common S. pyrastri.

Eristalinus sepulchralis.
The perfect birthday present – Helophilus trivitattus enjoying Garlic Chives.
A female Scaeva selenitica visiting a Cornflower.

Centipedes and Spiders

The gift of a Key to British Centipedes enabled me to add another species to the garden list, Cryptops hortensis. The Myriapods are rather neglected in the garden and only get a look-in in the winter when there are few insects to grab my attention. The same I’m afraid with spiders but I am getting to know them a bit better and have now recorded 44 species in the garden over two years of not really trying. (See Spider Selection in Review of the Year 2019 – Part 2 for my year’s highlights).

True Bugs

Several new True Bugs (Hemiptera) were recorded in the garden, including various capsids, and there was a welcome return of the planthopper Asiraca clavicornis. This is a lovely bug with quite a restricted distribution but seems to be expanding its range. As well as finding several in the garden, I also found them on our nearby allotments and in my local cemetery. 

Asiraca clavicornis has a limited distribution but is probably overlooked due to its small size.

The bug highlight was probably Crucifer Shieldbug, a species we’d only previously seen in the Brecks. I found a nymph on Perennial Wallflower ‘Bowles’ Mauve’ in the back garden and then an adult on spurge (Euphorbia characias) in the front. Another nice true bug was Vetch Aphid, found in the meadow on Bird’s-foot Trefoil. I don’t normally get excited about aphids but these were really rather pretty.

Crucifer Shieldbug – nymph and adult.
The rather lovely Vetch Aphids on a Bird’s-foot Trefoil seedpod.

Other Flies

Nice flies for the year included Gymnocheta viridis and Stomorhina lunata (first a male and then a female a few days later) with returns of soldierfly Stratiomys potamida (Banded General) and Mintho rufiventris, an uncommon species. 

A pair of bristly Tachinids – Gymnocheta viridis and Mintho rufiventris.
Stomorhina lunata male and female.

A couple of conopid flies, Physocephala rufipes and Conops quadrifasciatus, joined the ever-present Sicus ferrugineus. These flies are parasites on bees and wasps. Sicus ferrugineus is known as the Brown Bee-jumper as the females literally jump on the back of a bumblebee and insert an egg into it. The larvae feeds inside the bee, pupating after the host has died.

Conops quadrifasciatus (left) and Sicus ferrugineus.

Wasps

The number of solitary wasp species continued to rise and we got our first Bee Wolf which was rather pleasing. (I later discovered a nesting aggregation of these lovely creatures down the road from where we live, in a bare sandy verge.) Cerceris arenaria was new as were Gorytes laticinctus and Argogorytes fargeii (a Red Data List species).Two new species of Ruby-tailed wasp also graced the garden, Pseudomalus auratus and Hedychridium roseum.

Argogorytes fargeii .
Pseudomalus auratus.
Beewolf on Buddleia.

Butterflies

The butterfly highlight was an unexpected Purple Hairstreak that briefly flew in and landed at eye level right in front of us when neither of us had a camera! Rule number one of Naturalist Club is never go into the garden without a camera (and a pot, a net and a sketch book – oh how often that rule gets broken, I never learn!). This gave us 21 species for the year. (We missed out on Small Copper this year, our 22nd garden species.)  

Always a delight to see – the colourful Small Tortoiseshell is nowhere near as common as it once was.
Brown Argus, the 21st species for the year in the garden.

Orange-tips laid several eggs on a single, rather large Field Pennycress plant. Normally only one egg is laid per plant as the larvae will become cannibalistic if they run out of food plant. As our Field Pennycress plant was of such majestic proportions, it managed to support all 10 caterpillars to maturity.

Orange-tip larvae on Field Pennycress – young and fully grown.
‘Flight of Fancy’ – a celebration of butterflies in a hand-coloured linocut. With the addition of Purple Hairstreak (top) to our garden list this year all but one of these, the White Admiral, have now graced our garden.

Moths

Moths didn’t get much of a look-in as I barely ran the trap, but we did attract Latticed Heath and Tree Lichen Beauty as new species to the garden. Currant Clearwing was another addition to the garden list when one put in a brief appearance, possibly from the nearby allotments where we have previously recorded them. A Hummingbird Hawk-moth laid eggs on our Lady’s Bedstraw and we later found nine caterpillars.

Currant Clearwing was an unexpected surprise although they do occur on the nearby allotments.
Hummingbird Hawk-moth egg-laying on Lady’s Bedstraw (left) and a tiny glistening green egg hidden amongst the flowers (right). It later faded to a more yellow colour and was much harder to find.
Hummingbird Hawk-moth caterpillar.
I looked for caterpillars several times with no luck then suddenly found nine fully grown ones early one evening. I then found out that they largely feed at night so I should have been hunting by torchlight.

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