This year I have a bee hotel attached to the house which provides somewhere for solitary bees to nest. The most commonly seen garden solitary bee is the red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) which finds cavities, such as in walls…
Bumblebees in Sandy, 2012
Following on from my other enthralling posts about grasshoppers and bush-crickets, here is one about bumblebees. I always used to think there were two sorts of bee: honey bees and bumblebees. I later thought there are two sorts of bumblebee:…
Bush-crickets in Sandy, 2012
Following on from my write-up of grasshoppers I’ve seen in Sandy, I would like to do the same for their close-relatives, bush-crickets. Bush-crickets are also orthoptera, but I find them more interesting. They are generally shorter but more bulky, larger,…
Grasshoppers in Sandy, 2012
I don’t recall as a child ever seeing a grasshopper or cricket except for some locusts in the school science lab. Like most nature I assumed I didn’t live in the right place, or that these things were too scarce,…