Inula hookeri and its pollinators

 This shaggy member of the daisy family, with its beautifully geometric spiral pattern of unopened central florets, originates from the Himalayas. In my garden it's a great attraction to bees, that appreciate the long period of pollen production that results from the sequential opening of all those florets.

Drone flies, like the one below, are also attracted to this flower, visiting to feed on the nectar.  

The most intriguing visitor for pollen collection is the leaf cutter bee. This uses a brush of long orange hairs on the underside of its abdomen to collect pollen, and in the final picture you can see how it walks around the circle of open florets, sweeping up pollen with those hairs as it goes. 

Fatal attraction, to yarrow

Yarrow Achillea millefolium is a later summer wild flower that provides easily-accessed pollen and nectar for visiting insects, right up until the end of autumn. It's particularly popular with flies, like this greenbottle, and with hoverflies and droneflies. They can feed without expending much energy, simply by landing and walking from floret to floret across the flat-topped umbel.  

But sometimes just landing on the flowers can be hazardous. About thirty yarrow plants were hanging over a wall along Mortham Lane beside Rokeby park in Teesdale. They had been blown sideways by high winds during their early growth, and at the same time their flower heads had defied gravity and curled upwards, so the whole plant protruded from the wall like a long coat hook. And in that hook, in every plant, a money spider had built its hammock-shaped web, beside the flower head. Money spiders usually sling their horizontal hammock webs in hedges or low in the grass, but this population had taken advantage of the yarrow scaffolding that an accident of wind and gravity had provided.

I watched these plants swaying in the wind, while a long procession of insects came to feed. Drone flies are skilled hoverers and negotiated the risky landing successfully, and .....

.... hoverflies timed their approach and landing with even more precision, avoiding the spider's snare. But there was plenty of evidence, in the form of wings and legs in the webs, that other flies had been less fortunate, and had made a fatal landing in the money spider's web. I saw a blundering greenbottle land in the web, but with good fortune and some frantic buzzing it just managed to extricate itself before the spider arrived.

And in this old web a well-fed occupant had evidently done enough feeding, and had woven its egg cocoon amongst the leaves below the flower head, that had acted as bait for its victims.

Flies that might have come from the Garden of Earthly Delights

I'm sure I've seen some of the flies below amongst the nightmare monsters in a Hieronymus Bosch's  Garden of Earthly Delights .......

You know the painting?

By Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516) - Galería online, Museo del Prado., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45147809

A vision of hell, with all sorts of weird creatures from the medieval imagination, like this .....

... and this .......

... so some of these would fit in well in this improbably bestiary

Empid fly Empis digramma. Preys on other flies using those piercing, downward-pointing mouthparts

Snipe-fly Rhagio scolopaceus. rests head-down, then catches other flies in mid-air

Snipe-fly eyes

Scorpion-fly Panorpa germanica

Crane-fly

Drone-fly

Photographed along a short stretch of riverbank at Wolsingham in Weardale

The best time of the day in the garden ...

During this heatwave, the best time of the day to be in our garden is between 6am., when the sun creeps over the hedge, and 8am. when the day really begins to heat up.

The first shafts of sunlight spotlight the tallest plants, like this dill ......

..... or illuminate individual flowers like this meadow cranesbill.

Some insects, like these Solomon's seal sawfly larvae that defoliate our Solomon's seal plants at this time every year, probably feed during the night and retreat under what's left of the leaves during the hottest part of the day.

This solitary bee, which I haven't identified yet but might be a Nomada species, has taken up residence in one of the hogweed stem tubes in the 'bee hotel' that we made over the winter, and emerged as soon as the sun shone into its residence.

Even at 6am. it's warm enough for bumblebees to be very active ....

....... and as soon as the sun spotlights the tall monkshood flower spikes they attract a lot of attention from bumblebees.

Other bumblebees seem to specialise in collecting pollen from newly-opened opium poppies. Their technique is to crawl under the ring of stamens, buzz and work their way around between the stamens and the petals, showering themselves in pollen that they later comb off into their pollen baskets. By 7am. this bee's pollen baskets were already full.

This tree bumblebee adopted a different technique, visiting Lavatera flowers that wilted and closed yesterday and extracting the remaining nectar by forcing its long tongue down between the base of the petals and the sepals. 

Some insects, like this drone fly that mimics a bumblebee, perch on the lavender flower spikes just to bask in the sun ...

... while this common carder bumblebee was busy collecting nectar from the same plant.

Other early morning insects today included a green capsid bug which I think might be Lygocoris pabulinus, feeding inside a marigold ...

...... an anxious-looking froghopper, newly emerged from its 'cuckoo spit' cocoon of bubbles ........

.............. and a crane-fly that will probably soon end up in one of the many spiders' webs that are beginning to appear around the garden...

Transformers

Drone fly larvae, commonly known as rat-railed maggots, possess one of the most amazing pieces of equipment found in any insect larva. They live in waterlogged soil or shallow water around the margin of ponds, where the water level can rise and fall all the time - especially in a wet summer like the one we are enduring now. 

The long tail is the insect equivalent of a submarine snorkel, with muscles that allow it to shorten or elongate so that the tip of the tube is always level with the water surface.

At this stage in their life cycle they may not be high on aesthetic appeal but when they metamorphose they transform ........... 

...............into one of these 

A life that starts in stagnant mud becomes a drone fly, hovering in a sunbeam on a sunny afternoon.

A Glass Half-full kind of Summer....

.... a glass half-full of rainwater, that is.


I should be sitting in the garden sipping chilled wine now, not watching rain running down the window.

And this rain-spattered drone fly should be hovering in a shaft of sunlight. Still, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and .....

..... these house martins have plenty of mud available for nest construction. They were collecting mud around this puddle near Tunstall reservoir in Weardale yesterday. Seems very late to be building nests - I wonder if they were collecting it for nest repair?

Perfect weather for slugs too. I shudder to think what they are doing to my garden, but this one was demolishing a buttercup flower in the road verge.

Good weather for fungal growth too. These brackets were on a dead branch in Backstone Bank wood near Wolsingham.

And good weather for ducks, like this mallard surrounded by rain-bejewelled grasses.

And the raindrops do make an attractive pattern in the shallow water around the edge of Tunstall reservoir.


Accentuate the positive, as the song says....

Drinking in the Last Chance Saloon

Just when most of our flora finishes flowering, ivy comes into bloom and provides a last-minute autumnal energy top-up for insects like this drone fly (below, feeding on ivy pollen) and red admiral (above, drinking nectar), before the frosts arrive. To appreciate why its flowers are so attractive to insects, you need to take a really close look on a mild humid morning, when the disc at the centre of the flower is absolutely swimming in secreted nectar (see lower two photos) and newly open stamens are still full of fresh yellow pollen. It’s difficult to underestimate the value of this plant as an energy source for insects that hibernate, bearing in mind its wide distribution, the vast number of flowers produced on just a single plant and their long flowering period.

Freshly opened ivy flowers, oozing nectar and laden with pollen.