Insects and Spiders

Came across another one today whilst walking. Didn’t crush it this time. Pretty sure it is a fox moth caterpillar.

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Spider encounters today

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Jeepers, imagine the second one could have caused a bit of a moment..?

Depends what those tissues were being used for I suppose

Pretty spectacular oleander hawk-moth spotted on the Isle of Wight today. It was fairly high on a cliff so couldn’t add much to the zoomed photo for scale, but it was chunky.

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Wow. Look at that camouflage.

Like a frikin 90s Jungle Mix CD.

Follow this guy on twitter, and thought it might be of interest to people - he sells prints of meticulously detailed paintings of insects, which i thought are pretty cool!

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/MartynWarrenPrints

Huntsman spider ... harmless ... and not a particularly big specimen ... the thing that really gets people is when they hide behind the sun shade in the car, you flip it down and a hand size thing flies into your lap.

Since that's the workbench in shed, nothing that warrants weird insinuations, thanks

I saw a very large wasp (about two inches long) in Germany this week, but I don't know what it was, and I didn't have a camera on me. It couldn't find its way out of a tram window, so I helped it with a newspaper. I didn't recognise it because it had a very strange-looking lower body, without the typical wasp stripes but some kind of red blotch instead. I couldn't see if there was perhaps an injury. It seemed lively enough and not lacking in energy—in November! It may have been a queen that hadn't begun hibernation yet. I don't know when they usually start, but I would have thought it must previously have been before November. Anyway, I think these kinds of wasp are very beautiful and I loved seeing it, but I wanted to get it out of there before someone else attacked it.

A couple of weeks ago, I walked past some kind of pest control person who had just sprayed a wasps' nest in a front garden with something nasty and warned me about it, saying I should go around it in the carriageway. I did but when I looked at it, there were hundreds of wasps swarming around in that white nasty stuff haze—in late October, when most of them should already have died off. I went back to him and apparently the residents hadn't noticed the nest all summer but he was called when the wasps started to look for sweet stuff.

Quite generally, I'm still seeing so many insects around that it just seems out of whack.

Dunkelflaute?

Some sort of native paper wasp

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Some sort of native paper wasp

Is that a queen starting a hive? Looks like it.

Was that in reply to my post? If so, I don't understand it. I thought a "Dunkelflaute" was something about renewable energy.

I thought it was a weather phenomenon?

As in weirdly settled for November.

Hence Vespa.

Never seen a ladybird without any obvious spots before.

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Not an insect I know. But I bet he likes them (for snacks)

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I think these are Christmas beetles

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tell them to fuck off till December

They bother me less than the music in Bunnings

This chunky monkey has been hanging out in a corner of the bathroom steadily getting bigger and bigger

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They're now the only spider that gets the hoover treatment in our house following two first hand stories of bad reactions to their bite.

I've just set up an Insects and Spiders topic on the LFGSS Discord server at https://discord.com/channels/605497628259516447/1319360737197555712
Hope we don't have to use it, but just in case.

In other news, I started a Masters course in Entomology this autumn. I'm really enjoying it, meeting some fantastic like-minded people, and learning so much. Part of the course requires us to produce a museum-grade collection of at least 300 representative British insects. So come this spring expect a plenty of ento photos from me.

Ooh congrats, whereabouts? And good luck, let us know if you need a greater wax moth and can pop one in the post!