Insects and Spiders

Found this dude up on the chalk grassland on the Chiltern escarpment

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Male Broad Bodied Chaser, not bad for a phone pic.

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Nice!

What is this? Spotted in the garden, excuse the awful phone photos..

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Wow.

Worth keeping an eye on it.

Definitely a moth maybe a hawkmoth?

Privet? The wings need to be pumped up before it can fly.

Actually looking at the white lines on the thorax I'm gonna call Convolvulous.

I caught one as a child once on the South Coast.

Yep - newly hatched imago. Wings are soft and folded up to avoid damage as they drag themselves headfirst out their pupal case

Yep, 99% Lime Hawk.

First large Skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus) of the summer for me today

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10 Spot Ladybird larva

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saw this fuzzy one drop out of next door's ivy-swamped pear tree into my garden earlier. pretty sizeable...garden tiger moth?

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A swallow-tailed moth in the kitchen today. Probably came in last night.

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Not bad for a phone pic

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A male Ruddy Darter (Sympetrum sanguineum)

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a kinky Azure Damselfly (Coenagriaon puella) with only 3 and 1/3 wings but seeming to manage OK

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and a female Syrphus hoverfly - can't tell from the photo which species - all enjoying the warm sunshine down by the Thames yesterday

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False Widow?

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I reckon

Yeah. Looking at Google Images it seems likely

A blue moth. Edit: Box tree moth

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No, that's a real one and it looks radioactive. You'll soon be swinging between moderately high tenements.

Bloody things, invasive species and anyone with any box hedge will know the damage they can do.

😝 With a bit of luck Mary Jane will come over too

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/10/singapore-approves-insects-eat-food

Question for the group. I need to re-paint my garage, which has quite a few spiders in it. Some small ones, but also some tube-webs and a couple of large house spiders. I need to paint where they live, so can't leave them be.

How do I move them without either killing them or touching them? Hoover seems first option, but not sure how much damage it will do.

Suction sampling is a common field technique for sampling invertebrates, including spiders - see https://www.bug-net.org/invertebrate-sampling-protocol/. So, if you don't want to use the classic paper and pint glass method, some form of vacuuming is probably fine.