The long, hot summer has been great for insects, but September's "Indian summer", when dewy mornings give way to calm conditions, blue skies and sunshine have plenty of treats to offer still.
I took a walk opposite The Lodge shop last week, in an area known as Sandy Heath - confusing as it's not heathland now, but it is a wonderful area of grassland with wildflowers and bird seed crop that provides as feast for winter finches and buntings.
It's alive with the buzzing of Roesel's bush-crickets now and the chirping of grasshoppers. Brown argus, small copper and small heath are among the butterfly specialties and late summer brings the chance to find two impressive predators that combine the names of four different species in two!
Wasps in the grassWasp spiders are relatively recent colonists in the UK and are expanding their range northwards. They reached The Lodge a few years ago and the hotspot for them is now Sandy Heath. The rest of the Nature's Home team "ticked this one off" when we had our planning meeting for our January issue recently and I hoped to find a few more on my latets visit.
You'd think wasp spiders would be hard to miss but low down in their webs among dense grass, finding them is not as easy as you might think. (image cMark Ward)
Wasp spiders are one of those species that it takes a while to get your eye in and then once you've found one, your search engine kicks in and you find lots! I located nine in their webs today alongside the footpath.
Here's the underside of a wasp spider - still pretty striking (image cMark Ward)
Even the slight change of angle of walking back along the path revealed several I'd missed on the way down. I also noticed a few grasshoppers wrapped up in the the webs. The low nature of the wasp spider webs make them perfect traps for unsuspecting grasshoppers. With so many jumping around in the grassland here, it wouldn't take the spiders long to secure their next meal.
If you live in southern England, why not take a look for these beautiful spiders? Any areas of grassland are worth a look.
Bee-wolvesNow for one of the most confusingly-named species I can think of. The bee-wolf is an predatory solitary wasp (not a bee or a wolf) and it likes heathland and sandy sites with light soil where it excavates its burrows. It preys on worker honeybees and that's where the "bee" part of the name comes from. I suddenly came across four of these bright yellow beauties on a sandy section of path across the heath
This bee-wolf spent several minutes "preening" itself on a grass stem - not quite sure what it was doing! (image cMark Ward)
They must have come from Sandy Heath Quarry, a few hundred yards further along the track and had found good hunting here. One of them flew up onto a dead grass stem and I managed to get a few shots on my phone as it allowed unusually close approach during a break in its hyperactive lifestyle. Bee-wolves are one of the largest and most spectacular solitary wasps in the UK and were a real rarity not that long ago.
The handsome bee-wolf is a very effective predator and takes its prey down its tunnel dug in sandy soils (image cMark Ward)
Lots of insects look like, and in many cases purposefully mimic, wasps, including sawflies hoverflies and even moths, but the bee-wolf is easily dismissed as one of the sociable wasps despite having a very different lifestyle.
Now's the time to turn your attention to ivy flowers, which are now full of a wide range of hoverflies, flies and bees. More on that next week!