September 2020

The first sounds to be made by an animal on planet Earth probably came from an insect, more than 400,000,000 years ago. These were probably primitive cicadas or crickets. In England, we have a few insects that make noises such as grasshoppers, they do this by rubbing parts of their chitinous exoskeleton against another part, e.g. legs against wings. Insects also often make a noise when they fly, such as mosquitos, bees and wasps, warning us of their presence with a buzz.

Boris, Emmanuel and COVID-19 have finally allowed us to visit our nature refuge in France. Here, the insects have gone mad and there are vast numbers of them singing in chorus, especially during warm nights. The old barn is full of wooden cavities. These in turn are used for reproduction by a huge variety of ants, bees, wasps and sawflies. Collectively, known as Hymenoptera, Latin for membranous wings, describing their incredibly fine thin flying apparatus.

We have seen carpenter wasps and bees, paper wasps, grass carrying wasps, masonry wasps, both solitary and social wasps and bees, semi-social wasps and ants that are almost always social, also European and Asian hornets that are really very large social wasps. The other day, I was amazed to see what looked like a very large fat green caterpillar flying into a hole in a timber pillar. It was apparently being carried by a female grass carrying solitary wasp, which had paralysed it with its sting, was a fraction of the size of the caterpillar and was mainly black with transparent wings. The wasp took it into its wooden hole and laid an egg on or inside the caterpillar, then it spent about two days carrying many single blades of dried grass into the hole and finally arranged the grass into a closely woven nest around the caterpillar. The wasp’s egg will eventually hatch out and eat the hapless caterpillar and grow for a while before metamorphosing into an adult solitary grass carrying wasp. It will then emerge from the cavity and will carry on the tradition.

By day we also see many species of butterfly including scarce swallowtails, fritillaries and varieties of blues. Also, preying mantids and huge crickets, even an Egyptian locust! We also hear the diurnal cicadas endlessly zizzing their stridulation song high in the elm trees.