There I was, sitting in the garden, enjoying the sun and photographing the flowers, when this portly hymenopteran buzzed past my ear and crash-landed on a lady's mantle plant. It's the honeysuckle sawfly Zaraea fasciata (formely known as Abia fasciata) - and that makes sense because our garden hedge is full of flowering honeysuckle at the moment. Its larvae feed on honeysuckle foliage. It only settled for a few seconds and then I lost sight of it, but you can find a much better photograph of this insect at Pete Smith's Focus on Wildlife blog. Now I need to find the larvae on the honeysuckle. This isn't an insect I've seen in County Durham before.
It belongs to a family of sawflies called the Cimbicidae, or club-horned sawflies, that have clubbed antennae. The only other photo I managed to take - with a shift in focus - shows these quite nicely.
There are some more sawfly-related posts here
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