The environment: science, ethics and communication
I called my previous post “An unexpected visitor” but reflected soon afterwards that I should have saved the title for an even more unexpected visitor, the bat which flew in through the open back door on the evening of the same day.
It flitted round and round the house for ten or fifteen minutes, without ever settling Continue reading “A bat in the house”
Even after some eight years of regularly photographing insects in my suburban quarter-acre, I see “new” species – not necessarily new to me, far less new to science, but new (to my knowledge) to the garden.
It happened again this morning, with this Meadow Argus, Junonia villida, spotted on the back steps and photographed in the edge of the pool nearby. I don’t recall having seen one here before, although I know them from the Town Common (photo on flickr) and from Hervey’s Range.
Ants, wasps and bees (Hymenoptera) create a stunning range of nests, many of them so specific to the species that they can be used to identify their makers, as Mike Downes said in his article about black weaver ants.
That’s certainly true of Leafcutter bees (Megachile spp., Megachilidae, Apoidea) and we might even go one step further and identify them by the marks they leave behind when harvesting their nest-building material.
Leafcutters are solitary, not social like Continue reading “Leafcutter Bees”