Angelica and hemp agrimony - seething with insect life in late summer

 Angelica sylvestris, a member of the Apiaceae (carrot family) is surely one of the best umbellifers for supplying insects with pollen and nectar. It thrives in moist soils places, often in dappled sunlight along woodland edges. The pictures below are of a greenbottle, a Darwin wasp (ichneumon) and social paper wasps feeding on nectar from its numerous tiny florets. The nectar is secreted in small amounts on each individual flower, so is easily accessible to short-tongued insects, without them needing to expend much energy; all they need do is wander across the umbel, incidentally pollinating the flowers as they feed.

Hemp agrimony Eupatorium cannabinum, a tall, pink-flowered member of the daisy family (Asteraceae) seems to be flowering spectacularly well along the Durham coast near Nose's Point this summer, in the company of meadowsweet and creeping thistle. Soldier beetles (last photo) are amongst the vast number of insects that visit its flowers, in the company of bees, butterflies and many species of fly.

Wasps - the end is near

Almost at the end of the wasp season now. but there are still a few lethargic common wasps Vespula vulgaris in the garden, feeding on rotting fallen fruit. After cold nights they move very slowly, so it's easy to get close to them and get a good view of those powerful jaws. All season long they've been chewing wood to make paper for their nests, then catching other insects to feed their brood. Now, in their final days, they search for anything sweet to boost their flagging energy levels.

A few are feeding on the last of the late-season red-hot pokers Kniphofia sp. These popular garden flowers grow wild in South Africa, where they are pollinated by sunbirds that come to feed on the large volumes of nectar they secrete. The nectar trickles downwards in the dangling, tubular flowers and the wasps force their way in, so they often become covered in the sticky secretion and need to spend a lot of time cleaning their antennae afterwards.

Click here for pictures of the remarkable structure of a wasp nest - a marvel of paper engineering.

A good beer guide for wasps .........?

In autumn, when wasps finish breeding, they turn their attention to anything sweet and often become a nuisance. One solution is to trap them in narrow-necked bottles container a mixture of jam and water - but there are other baits that can be used too.

Back in 2007 a researcher in the Czech Republic called Libor Dvorak tested out traps containing beer as a bait (he didn't mention which brand) and after trapping 3583 wasps of 8 different species at 131 sites across Europe, including several in Britain, found that three species including the common wasp Vespula vulgaris (above) were most prone to drowning in the traps. I suppose there are worse ways to go. If you want to read the original scientific paper you can download it by clicking here.

As far as I can tell, no one has ever followed up this research by testing whether wasps have a particularly preference for any type or brand of beer. Do they have a favourite tipple? Guinness? Fosters? Budweiser? Carling? 

Clearly there's scope for some important and original research here. Maybe drink 95 per cent of the beer in ten different bottles, then line the bottles up and see how many wasps end up in each bottle?v At 131 sites across Europe?

My kind of experiment.