CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

  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 ...

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

I learned the hard way that seemingly perfect ripe plums can be hollow on the side that you can't see when you reach up to pick them, a...

Some insects in our garden undergrowth (it's a jungle out there!) An anxious cabbage white butterfly, checking that the coast is ...

My son recently discovered this queen wasp building her nest just inside the garden shed door. He's going to t...

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes an exploration of the nest that tree wasps built in our garden hedge. Tree wasps Do...

I've been watching this female blackbird in the garden for several days, while she has been collecting nest materia l and buil...

Yesterday this wasp was coaxed out of hibernation in our conservatory by the bright sunshine, even though there was still plenty of snow ...

On sunny days wasps often land on the patches of duckweed on our pond, to drink from the surface - and sometimes they fall in and become tra...