Six on Saturday – 15th August 2020

This week in Ireland we are celebrating all things heritage for Heritage Week. This includes our wonderful natural heritage so I thought for this week’s six I would focus on an insect theme. This is what was happening around the garden today.

1. Honey bee – I occasionally get honey bees coming into the garden. They are particularly partial to the opium poppies. In Ireland, our native honey bee is called Apis melifera melifera, and is a darker version of Apis melfiera. The darker colour is thought to be an adaptation to our colder climate.

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  honey bee and poppy

2. Common carder bumblebees aren’t too fussy about which flowers they visit. Today I saw them on raspberries, comfrey and figworth. They are a great all rounder and you will even see them foraging in rain.

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  Common carder bee

3. My third bee is the garden bumblebee. These bumbles are great runner bean pollinators but they like the poppies too.

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  Garden bumblebee

4. And one more bee – this time on the runner beans is the white tailed bumble.

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  white tailed bumblebee on runner bean

5. And sticking with insects but moving away from bees, is this little grasshopper, which I rescued from the water butt. Happy to say he hopped away seemingly unscathed, once he had dried off a bit.

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  Grasshopper

6. And a final image for this week is a shieldbug instar – in other words an immature shieldbug that still needs to do some growing! I think this one may be the common green shieldbug.

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  shieldbug

Thank you to The Propagator for hosting Six on Saturday.