CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

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...

  There are scores of these colourful little semaphore flies in the garden at the moment, performing their highly entertaining courtship rit...

  Poor photo (heavily cropped, taken with an old phone in deep shade) but this appears to be a queen wasp mating with drones. They all flew ...

 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...

  Buff-tailed bumblebees Bombus terrestris are nesting under a moss-covered pile of rocks in the garden. There were field mice living in th...

  Speckled wood butterflies have been expanding their range northwards , into County Durham and beyond, for fifteen years now. They've b...

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

 A freezing cold afternoon, but a swarm of these winter gnats Trichocer a sp. was dancing, in a shape-shifting column, above the garden hedg...

 Himalayan balsam is notoriously invasive and the chances of ever eliminating it on a large scale seem negligible. Even when plants are pull...

  Human colour vision allows us to see a spectrum of colours that extends from violet to red - the colours of the rainbow - but bumblebees...

  This lovely peacock butterfly must have found its way into the house, unnoticed, during the very mild weather last October, and has been h...

There seemed to be dark-edged bee-flies Bombylius major all over the garden during most of April, either sunning themselves on stones or c...

Here's something I've never seen before - a common wasp killing a hoverfly. They both landed in a rose flower at the same moment an...

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