Our Pagham Seals Wildlife Explorers (WEx Group) have been busy making hoverfly lagoons to help the University of Sussex citizen science project, The Buzz Club, understand which material and environment provides the best habitat for hoverflies to reproduce.
Hoverflies are pollinators like bees but tend to get overlooked. Although these brightly-coloured insects may look like bees or wasps, they are in fact true flies and do not sting. Hoverflies are excellent examples of Batesian mimicry. They generally mimic bees and wasps – insects that sting and also taste unpleasant, so are avoided by predators. There are about 250 different hoverfly species in Britain. You can generally see plenty of adults on flowers throughout spring, summer and autumn. Getting involved with the project encourages the local population and gives our Wildlife Explorers the chance to learn more about them.
Marmalade hoverfly (Chris Shields)
Volcella bombylans (Chris Shields)
Cutting up large milk bottles to create the lagoon container, they packed the lagoons with either grass cuttings, nettles, wood chips, hay or leaf litter as advised by the project.
A couple of twigs were put into each lagoon to allow the larvae to move about, before adding tap water and finally a layer of leaf litter above the water line on top of the lagoons. This provides a landing platform for the female hoverflies to lay their eggs.
Suitable shady sites were found around Pagham Harbour and the lagoons were positioned on trays filled with soil and topped with more leaf litter, creating a site for the larvae to move and pupate.
During the summer, the Wildlife Explorers will inspect the lagoons, count the long tailed larvae and any other life that has made its home in their lagoons, search the trays for pupae and transfer them into jam jars to store and monitor until they emerge and are finally released.
Numbers of which hoverflies prefer which habitat and photographic evidence will all be fed back to Sussex University on a monthly basis. If you would like to know more about this project or set-up your own lagoons at home, please visit http://thebuzzclub.uk/citizen-science-projects and if you would like to know more about the Pagham Seals Wildlife Explorers group, contact us here at the reserve.