Harbingers of Spring

As I sat in the sun on Sunday I noticed my favourite insect was on the lobelia. It comes every year at around this time and if the Hummingbird Hawkmoth is in the garden, then the seasons are moving on.

I should make clear, first of all, that I do not have an extensive list of favourite insects. In fact it’s rather the other way about – I have a list of distinctly unfavourite insects. and if you include spiders (and I do know they’re not strictly insects but they have the same limited appeal) then the list is considerably lengthened.

However, I will make an exception for the Hummingbird Hawkmoth

Hummingbird Hawkmoth

It comes every year – well, I assume it’s not exactly the same one – but we are visited every year and I find it endlessly fascinating. the BBC website tells me that it is indeed a moth despite the fact that I see it during the day and had assumed that all moths were nocturnal. It doesn’t make a noise, it doesn’t do much in fact except hover and feed but it makes my year complete to see it. Strange really.

I also enjoy watching the bumble bees. There were a few of those on the lobelia this weekend as well. I didn’t see the major Bombus Terrestris or the Hercules of the bumblebee flight – like the Hercules you wonder how either can fly – but I did see the smallest bumblebee I have ever seen. I wondered if it was a baby! It’s little panniers were packed to the gills with pollen, it was working for its life! And then I got to wondering when little bumblebees get to go out gathering.

And then I thought that maybe I should get a life . Unfortunately the Bumblebee Trust web page only lists the top six species, so I don’t know how I will find out what it was.

If you sit on a lawn quietly you will often see many different bees – bumble and honey and probably other varieties as well. Each has their different preference for flower so you will see more or less of them through the seasons. And unlike some other insects, they will tend to leave you alone so you are quite safe just to observe them. In fact most insects will leave you alone.

We have another – less attractive annual visitor to our garden. Or, more particularly, to our shed. I usually forget, go in to fetch some implement, hear a humming. Look up to find a wretched queen hornet busily making a nest. How do they know? Is there some kind of pheromone left behind? Each year we destroy the wretched thing and each year they return. Hornets are mild enough – they’ve never caused me any problems (apart from their nest-building activities) – although I believe their stings can be quite horrendous. I always consider them to be like the V2 bombers. While you can hear the noise, you’re OK. When the it stops, you’re in trouble. One year, they did the dirty on us and built a nest in the thatch. Or was that wasps? Now there’s an insect I cannot abide. Nasty, aggressive things.

What I would say is that if you come across a Bombus Terrestris on a path, you would be doing it a kindness to put it on a small leaf and branch and just gently moving it out of the way because my understanding is that they can suddenly get depleted, especially when the sun goes down – and run out of energy. Just put them somewhere safe and out of the way – in the sun or on a flower if you can – until they recover.

I suppose I ought not to be too surprised at my mild fascination for the bee. My grandfather was an apiarist of some experience. He worked at Rothamsted between the wars. If the stories I’ve been told are right, he used to investigate Foul Brood in apiary bees and worked with a colleague across a quadrangle. The story goes that if the colleague thought he had found an insect with Foul Brood he would hold up a card with the letters FB on it to the window. If my (notoriously short-tempered) grandfather disagreed he would hold up a similar piece of card with the letters BF on it.

He would have up to half a dozen bee hives in the garden and the water butts had pieces of cork floating in each of them so the bees could rest and take a sip of water. He also had slates with runnels and miniscule ponds engraved in them between the down-pipe and the water-butt to provide yet more bee-sized watering holes.

On one occasion – we never did discover why – my younger brother (aged about 3?) decided that the only thing he had to do was go and thump one of the hives with his teddy-bear (for some reason I particularly remember that this bear had been blue but had faded to a peculiar shade of grey). Exeunt small boy pursued by a number of very unhappy bees. And an equally distraught parent.

My husband used to keep bees and, in the early days of our marriage joined a local bee-keeping club. He happened to mention one night that his wife’s grandfather had been a bee-keeper and told them the name. To be met by the riposte “Ah yes, mad Major Morland” Unhappily he reported this back to my mother, who never forgave him!

But there my fascination ends. I can’t replicate the interest of another ancestor from the other side of the family tree who devoted her life’s interest to Diptera (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v145/n3666/abs/145178b0.html). I do draw the line at Typical Flies