Ivy

Rob, over at The Living Isle, on the Isle of Wight, has posted some interesting pictures of wasps visiting ivy flowers , while pictures of red admirals and honeybees on the same plants were posted by Blackbird over on Bugblog recently. Despite a frost earlier in the week, the ivy up here in the North East is still flowering well and attracting the last surviving insects - which are now mostly flies.

Ivy is so common and widespread that we tend to take it for granted but it really is one of the most important plants in the British flora. What other species provides so much nectar and pollen late in the autumn for insects, followed by berries to feed departing migrants in spring - with a dense covering of waterproof leaves through the intervening winter to provide shelter for hibernating insects?

This fly, which is showing a lot of wear-and tear on the trailing edges of its wings, is acting like a living pollination brush. The structure of the flowers, with the anthers elevated above the nectar secreting ovary, pretty much guarantees that the ivy flowers will be pollinated  ....

... as the fly stumble across the flowers, reaching down with its short proboscis, half-blinded by pollen that it's picked up. The strange musty scent of ivy, which has been likened in mouldering papers in damp cupboards, seems very attractve to flies - if you put a cut flower shoot in a room where flies are bouncing against the window, they'll soon turn their attention to the flowers and start to feed.