Little finds

Some of the best finds can be unexpected and completely accidental.

En-route to pick up a car earlier in the week there was a detour, so I stopped at a lay-by to confer with Mr. Google. I spotted this wonderful little moth out of the car window and jumped out with the camera. It's the Latticed Heath:

Latticed Heath Moth

This is a Clover feeder and is found in grassy areas. One generation in this area.

New to my species list.

Yesterday I was called out to examine what appears to be a fungal rust on Himalayan Balsam:

Fungal attack on Himalayan Balsam

This is an extremely invasive plant, and it has now reached most parts of Britain and Ireland. To date the local populations have been free from predators or parasites, since it is an introduced alien. But last year I found a leaf-miner and now we have this fungal rust, so perhaps we can expect populations to begin to weaken. That might just open up opportunities for other parasites to take hold, so perhaps we're seeing the start of some kind of weakening/control. I can certainly confirm that the miner has spread very rapidly and has now been found in perhaps half a dozen new sites around the country, some hundreds of kilometres apart.

After I had examined the rust, I went back to the car-park to find a stand of Comfrey on a stream-bank. Some of the leaves had a fungal attack and I have now identified this as Melampsorella symphyti:

The fungal rust Melampsorella symphyti on Comfrey

There are very few records of this on the FRDBI and seems it's new to Ireland.

A few more recent images are instructive:

This is the excellent Nettle associate Calocoris stysi: 

The Mirid Bug Calocoris stysi

The leaf-mining fly Pegomyia solennis is one of the few that are communal. Always found on Rumex sp., especially Broad-leaved Dock:

Larvae of the communal Dock miner Pegomyia solennis

Some leafhoppers are absolutely minute. This is the Meadowsweet specialist Eupteryx signatipennis, about 3 mm. long:

Meadowsweet specialist leafhopper Eupteryx signatipennis

New to my species list.

Finally, another oddity. I have a huge Lavatera bush in my garden and it is usually covered in bees, wasps and hoverflies all nectaring. I had assumed that the bees were gathering pollen, too, but it seems that the pollen is no use to Honeybees and Bumblebees: they actively remove it after they have taken the nectar:

Honeybee removing pollen from Lavatera.

Note the empty pollen baskets.

Keep learning

Over the years, as experience builds up, you make a series of 'rules' which help you reach an identification. Until yesterday, one of my rules was "If you see a bee which is less than 20mm long, then it isn't one of the social bees". Applying this rule, I leaned towards one of the Andrena solitary bees for this specimen: 

But it didn't match any of the images that I could find in the usual places. When I asked for help, back came "It's a Honeybee". Blinded by assumption (and not helped by the fact that this was roughly 60% - 70% as big as I would normally see), I had excluded the obvious. Factor in the fact that Honeybees have become very rare in our area, and the mistake is easy to make.

Assume nothing.

Moving swiftly on......

This Eristalis tenax hoverfly has the very dark colouring that we expect to see in early specimens. The summer generation of many of our hoverflies is much brighter due to the higher temperatures. This female will have mated at the end of last year and has managed to successfully shelter in some nook or cranny through the -17 degrees that we endured in December:

Female Eristalis tenax

The Willow catkins opened last Thursday (17th) and insects have been busy nectaring and gathering pollen ever since. This queen Bombus lucorum bumblebee found the pollen quickly enough:

Queen Bombus lucorum

She is now gathering enough pollen to feed the first few workers from her nest, and she will spend the rest of the year laying more eggs to sustain the nest and produce drones and queens for next year's generation. A few of the new queens actually become workers for a while at the end of the season, gathering pollen alongside the last of the workers.

With the early willow pollen season being so short, no time is wasted before the willow-dependent moths appear. This is the first Common Quaker - Orthosia cerasi - of the year:

Common Quaker - Orthosia cerasi

The Common Quaker is readily identified by the large, rounded, 'kidney mark' which has a pale, thin, outline which matches the colour of the thick band near the trailing edge of the wing.