Garden snails Cornu aspersa

 

Garden snails Cornu aspersa mating.

One of the reasons garden snails are so successful is that they are hermaphrodite. In animals with separate sexes in equal numbers only half the population can produce eggs; in hermaphrodites like these snails every individual can lay eggs.

But they still need to mate, to exchange sperm, after a Cupid-like courtship ritual. Two individuals glide along side by side and fire calcareous love-darts into each-other, coated in a hormone which facilitates mating. and sperm exchange.

Larder beetles

 

 

A larder beetle Dermestes lardarium. This little beetle, about 5mm. long, has a particular liking for laying its eggs on bacon, cooked hams, sausages and fish. It used to be very common in houses in the days before domestic refrigerators were available, but is no longer such a familiar pest.

Those romantic ‘cottage-core’ photographs, of hams and game hanging from wooden beams in country cottage kitchens, belie the constant battle with pest infestations that came with traditional methods of food storage. Neither of my grandparents, who stored their food in a cool larder and their meat in a meat safe, protected from insects by a fine wire mesh, had refrigerators and probably had cause to curse larder beetles.

They also turn up in old wasp nests, feeding on the remains of dead wasp larvae. This one landed on my window ledge and I suspect that it came from an old wasp nest in the loft.

Holly blues

 

A female holly blue Celastrina argiolus, like a flake of blue sky that has fallen to Earth, has been laying eggs on holly flower buds in the garden.

When we first came to live in Co. Durham in 1975 several butterflies that I had been familiar with in the south of the country were nowhere to be seen. There were no holly blues, commas had been extinct here for a century and speckled woods, small skippers and ringlets were very uncommon. Since then, as the climate has changed and winters have become milder, they have all become common. Speckled woods regularly breed in my garden now, here in the foothills of the North Pennines.

I didn’t seen a holly blue here in the North East until 2014, when I found one under the Byker viaducts in Newcastle, of all places. Then in 2017 I saw another in Sunderland.

In 2019 they turned up in my garden in Durham in spring and it was clear that they must have laid eggs on the holly hedge because the summer generation emerged and then laid eggs on ivy flower buds The adult butterflies seem attracted to forget=me-not and alkanet flowers in spring and the summer generation nectar on borage, devil’s bit scabious, marjoram and thyme flowers.