Fun and games on OtterCam

Another first on OtterCam.  This is the first time I have seen two otters playing.  Five nights before I had several times seen one otter following another in and out of the water and could hear splashing off camera but this time they are play fighting. The whole episode lasted for 10 minutes but only fragments were captured on camera, partly because the otters were sometimes out of view and partly because Browning cameras (frustratingly) only record for 20s at night.

This is a dog otter and a female but I don't know the relationship between them.  In early May the mother of the previous cubs seemed to be encouraging attention from a dog otter.  If all went according to plan then I would have expected new cubs to be born about now, in which case she certainly wouldn't be playing or flirting.  It is also interesting that there is no vocalisation.  When the female was previously encouraging attention from the dog she was constantly chittering. This time we hear only splashing.  Here is the video.

Purple rain

It has been a horribly wet weekend with almost non-stop rain.  When it eased slightly this afternoon I took my umbrella and went for a walk round the garden with my camera, hoping perhaps to find a few soggy bumblebees.  Instead I found a butterfly sitting on top of a sunflower leaf in the rain.  For a moment I didn't recognise it and then couldn't quite believe it was a purple hairstreak.

Having checked my photo against my field guide I brought the butterfly into the dry.  Unlike other hairstreaks, purple hairstreaks characteristically bask with their wings outspread but even indoors this one wasn't obliging.

To provide it with a bit of "sunshine" I brought out an anglepoise lamp and then it did open its wings to show it is a female, with iridescent patches on the forewings.

Perhaps attracted by the warmth it then flew into the hood of the lamp.

We agreed that wasn't a sensible place to stay so it obliged with a couple more photos before being released once the rain had eased.

Purple hairstreaks spend most of their time high in the canopy of mature oak trees (of which there are quite a few in the garden) so it isn't such a surprise to find one here.  However, because they feed on honeydew from aphids they rarely come down to ground level.  Now I know they are here I'll look for the males flying high in the trees on sunny afternoons (if we have any). 

News from the bee house

Fortunately the solitary bee season coincided with warm sunny weather in late spring and early summer.  Now it is wet and gloomy the season is almost over but it has been fascinating to watch and mostly very successful for the bees.  The most numerous residents of the bee houses are always red mason bees.  This is a female in the observation wing having a brief rest before setting off to forage again.

In most previous years I have had between half a dozen and a dozen completed red mason bee nests.  This year, with my new bee house, I have about 80!  Here are 34 of them.

In the next photo the rear cell is complete with a food store of pollen and nectar and an egg. Work has started on the front one contains a bit of pollen and a pool of regurgitated nectar.

A few days later it looks like this.

Here is another bee coming back with a load of pollen.

The bees always reverse in to unload pollen.

Here are a couple of bees plugging the entrances to their nests.

There was one blue mason bee nest from last year with nine cells.  The front six were males. This is one of them.

Once they had chewed their way out of their cocoons five of them sat in the nest for another 24 hours before deciding to brave the outside world.

The females emerged a few days later and one of them moved into my new bee house.

She uses chewed leaves rather than mud to the build the cells.

Here she is in the precess of laying an egg.

Another bee in the new house was a common yellow face bee (Hylaeus communis) but she completed only three cells.  She made several more cellophane walls along the hole before sealing it so three was all she planned.  The nectar pollen mix she brought in was almost black.

The observation part of my original bee house is still in use and this year, for the first time, it was host to a leafcutter bee.  I was very pleased until I realised that she was lining the cells first before working on them so I couldn't see what was going on!  The nest was in an old red mason nest, hence the mud lining.

The bee house has a wire mesh covering as protection against woodpeckers.  Rather than risk dropping the leaf if she flew through the mesh, this bee flew in the bottom each time and then flew vertically upwards to reach the nest.

I was struck by the precision in the final work to seal the nest.

Another resident of the "bee" house was a mason wasp, a solitary wasp that uses mud in the same way as the red mason bee does.  It used a smaller hole and filled the cells with caterpillars rather than pollen.  Here it is clearing out sawdust before starting to build cells, with a red mason bee in the background.

There were other solitary wasps which were tiny.  They made their own holes in the wood, about 1mm in diameter, and stocked them with aphids.  Louise Hislop, our local bee & wasp expert, says they are Passaloecus sp. females.

Perhaps the most exciting bees I saw in the bee house were fork-tailed flower bees.  They nest in rotten wood so I made one panel out of dried rotten wood, specifically in the hope that they would move in.  I made three small starter holes and was surprised and delighted to see that for several days two of them were excavated by female fork-tailed flower bees.  But although I often saw the bees pushing their way out through clouds of sawdust I never saw them going in with pollen.  I wonder if they didn't fancy the holes after all after all that digging.  With luck they did continue when I wasn't looking.  I'll be able to remove the panel later in the year to take a look.

I am already making plans for next year, to make sure there will be room for perhaps an even larger population of bees.

Summer ladybirds

I enjoyed looking for ladybirds in the winter but they turn out to be even more interesting in summer.  At this time of year the last winter adults have died off and we can see larvae, pupae and newly emerged adults.  I can't show them all but here are a few that have caught my eye recently.

Striped Ladybird.  A larva, a pupa, and a newly emerged adult from Havannah Nature Reserve and a mature adult I found a few weeks ago on the roundabout at the end of my road.

Pine Ladybird.  A larva and a pupa from Havannah and an adult from the Spetchells.

Eyed Ladybird.  A larva from Hepple and a pupa and newly emerged adult from Havannah.

Cream-streaked Ladybird.  A larva and a pupa from Jesmond Old Cemetery.  This was a hot spot for hibernating ladybirds in the winter but obviously some are there all year round.

Larch Ladybird.  A larva from the Spetchells and a new adult from Jesmond.

Heather Ladybird.  A larva and an adult, both tiny and both from Hepple.

While looking through the branches of Scots pines I saw quite a few empty mummies of Scots pine aphid nymphs (Cinara pini) like this.  They have been attacked by a parasitoid wasp.

And here's an interesting finding.  A 14-spot Ladybird larva lunching on a smaller 14-spot larva.

10-spot Ladybird.  A larva and two new adults from an oak tree in my garden and a newly emerged decempustulata form from Hepple.

22-spot Ladybird.  A larva from my garden and an adult I found on the bathroom wall.

The best finding of all was my first 11-spot Ladybird (Coccinella undecimpunctata) at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea.

And a new species for the garden, a tiny Rhyzobius litura in my meadow, one of the so-called inconspicuous ladybirds, this one 2.5mm long.

It is amazing how many ladybirds there are around now that I am learning how to find them and how to identify them.  I'll keep an eye out over the summer for any more I can find.