Cee Neuner’s Midweek Madness Challenge (CMMC) this week is for dark green colours. Those of you who follow me on Twitter may already have seen this photo. It was posted for the #WildWebWednesday hashtag, where people, who are interested in wildflowers post photos of creatures and organisms which are dependent on them.
Nymph of green shieldbug seen on 31 August in our garden
From one of the botanists on Twitter (Moira O’Donnell) I learned that this was not an adult shield bug, but a nymph of the green shield bug. Rather handsome, don’t you think?
There is an adult shield bug here and more dark green here.
Don’t forget to visit Cee’s blog for her photos and links to those of other participants.
This year the wasps returned to the bird box, which hubby had cleaned out after last year’s nest had been deserted. There was some activity until a hot spell, which the wasps did not survive. The wasps seemed to attempt to regulate the temperature inside the box. A few of them stood near the entrance flapping their wings.
I have done more gardening this year than in previous years, digging out some invasive plants to give other species a better chance. The invasive plants will spread again from the small clumps I have left. While I was working in a shady part of the garden some movement attracted my attention. It was a large, healthy-looking frog, which disappeared into the undergrowth. There isn’t a pond in our garden, but there must have been enough moisture for this amphibian even at the end of a dry spell.
Another amphibian, which was hiding under a boot-cleaning device propped against the edge of the patio, was a toad. It stayed nearby long enough for me to fetch my camera.
We saw a bee with a red tail digging a hole in the sloping lawn. It stayed inside, making photography difficult. Afterwards the hole had been filled in. If we hadn’t seen the bee, we might not have noticed the fine soil on the surface. Can we expect any bees to emerge?
The bee digging (above the fine soil on the top right)
The bees’ nest we had in the front garden last year has not been used again.
We have seen a few caterpillars. There were one or two green ones on the aquilegia. Buff-tip moth caterpillars (identified by Annabel Sherwood on Twitter) were new to us. They were all spotted on the ground; on two occasions on a path and a smaller one on the earth.
Various pollinators have included bees, hover flies and a few butterflies, especially white ones. A handsome bug was identified by Moira O’Donnell as a green shieldbug nymph – what would I do without Twitter?
Candy-stripe spiders have made their nests inside the lid of our brown garden-waste bin. Thanks to Dolly for the identification. They were there at the beginning of August and are still there a month later. The egg sacs are possibly a bit bigger.
When I was looking through my photos to find a suitable one for this CMMC challenge, my first thought was to post a photo of the passionflower in our garden. The photos I had were interesting, but not up to the standard of this challenge. Instead I posted a fungus.
The very next day there was a new flower, so I am posting a photo of it here and linking with two of Cee’s challenges – CMMC (Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge) and FOTD (Flower of the Day). There are raindrops on the flower.
