Queen wasp mating

 Poor photo (heavily cropped, taken with an old phone in deep shade) but this appears to be a queen wasp mating with drones. They all flew away, still locked together, before I could get a better picture.

Mid-July seems very early for new queens to be leaving a nest - they usually hibernate after mating - but still plenty of summer left for her to start a new nest this year, I suppose.

Two wasp generations in one summer? Are seasonal patterns of insect behaviour confused by changing climate, maybe?

This morning, riverbank footpath, Durham city

Centaury

 Wild flowers have bloomed early and flowered quickly in this year's summer heatwaves. The barley harvest has already begun and grassland in the landscape is parched, the colour of a well-baked digestive biscuit. So I was surprised to find these exquisite little flowers of centaury Centaurium erythraea in full bloom amongst withering grasses on a footpath verge, in a place I've walked many times but had never seen them before.

Centaury is an annual species that seems to thrive in dry locations, including sand dunes. Its seeds germinate in late autumn when water is plentiful, wintering as a rosette of leaves, restarting growth in spring and then sending up a spike of flowers in early summer. If this year's sequence of heatwaves and drought becomes established, maybe this winter-annual growth pattern will be a winning strategy.

Ripe cherries

 Wild cherries Prunus avium have been ripening this week in Weardale. I've tasted quite a lot of wild cherries over the years and most are sour or bitter-tasting, but occasionally I come across a tree with unusually juicy, deep red fruits that make excellent cherry sauce for pouring over ice cream. It looks like a bird has already had a peck at one in the first picture, below. Once they begin to ripen the birds take them very quickly. 

Rooks often eat those that fall under the tree but only hawfinches have beaks that are strong enough to split open the stones. Otherwise the seeds pass unharmed through their gut and are dispersed to become new seedling trees, unless field mice find them. 

When I demolished our old garden shed a few years ago I found a wood mouse's stash of scores of cherry stones from the tree that used to grow in our garden hedge, each with a neat hole nibbled in it, where the rodent had extracted the kernel.