Species galore!

I've had a productive couple of weeks for wildlife-spotting - spring is properly here and the insects in particular are responding to the change.

As the buds burst and flowers begin to appear, insects too are emerging from their winter dormancy. The new leaves are covered with leafhoppers and caterpillars, and the flowers with pollen beetles and bees.

If you go by the media reports you might be forgiven for thinking there's just one British bee, the honeybee Apis mellifera. In fact, it's a bit more complicated than that - we have 1 honeybee, 25(ish) bumblebees and 230-250 species of solitary bees. Various bumbles and the honeybee visit my garden, but I'm lucky enough to have some of the solitaries call it home. In particular two species live in the back wall of my house. One of the signs of early spring is the colony of Hairy-footed flower bees (Anthophora plumipes) waking up, darting at high speed between flowers and zipping in and out of the holes in the wall. Zipping is really the word too - electrifyingly fast, the males in particular seem to move flower to flower without occupying the intervening space.

A male Hairy-footed flower bee, Anthophora plumipes

The other species hasn't shown itself just yet - the Red mason bee, Osmia bicornis (formerly O. rufa, a much more appropriate name for this bright red bundle of energy!). It's about - I found one in Oxford city centre last week, and several in Winchester cathedral close on Tuesday - but my garden colony are clearly having something of a lie-in!

The best indicator of the changing seasons though is the moth trap in my back garden. A 125-Watt mercury-vapour bulb perched on top of a box of moth bedding (aka egg boxes), it attracts in a sample of the moths flying past, ready to be identified and released the following morning. You never get the same mix of species and individuals twice running, so it's a great way to measure the changing of the seasons.

The moth trap, doing its thing in the back garden

I started trapping for the year in early March, catching small numbers of the early-spring species. Gradually as the year wore on, the numbers got bigger (60 moths of 11 species on the 2nd April the best to date) and the species changed - Orthosia (Quakers and the Hebrew Character) began to dominate, Common Quaker in particular. In the last week what I think of as the 'late spring' species have begun to appear - the furry Muslin moth (Diaphora mendica) and an early Bee moth (Aphomia sociella) - reinforcing that the world is moving forwards, and summer is shimmering on the horizon...