CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

  Sweet violets  Viola odorata  produce two types of flower - the familiar scented kind that are amongst the first wild flowers to appear in...

The fourth heatwave of the year arrived, the temperatures soared and the ants in one of the garden waste recycling bins took to the air in v...

 For the second year in succession we have ants nesting in one of the garden waste recycling bins, which happens to be close to a cardoon pl...

  Spent a lazy hour sitting in April sunshine watching foraging ants, in constant transit to and from their nest in a big terracotta flower ...

  We've been composting garden and kitchen vegetable waste in 'Dalek' bins like this for decades, but this year was the first ti...

My daughter and her partner have a raised flower bed in their garden near Cambridge, built from old railway sleepers, and yesterday large nu...

We found these ants 'farming' aphids on a ragwort plant when we were out walking in the Tyne valley near Wylam this morning. ...

I've seen ants visiting small flowers before ( like this one visiting sea milkwort ) but I didn't notice the ant on this heath bedst...

The undisturbed grassland in glades in the hawthorn scrub in Auckland Castle Park, at Bishop Auckland in Co. Durham, is home to an astonishi...

Ivy's flowers provide a wonderful nectar and  pollen resource for insects in autumn (see some examples at the bottom of this post) and ...