Last Saturday morning I was on my way to Newcastle in bright weather and decided to to stop off at the place where I saw a good number of small heath butterflies last Spring, a derelict brownfield location abounding in litter that must now be described as 'somewhere between Swalwell and Dunston.'
I started seeing butterflies as soon as I arrived but instead of the expected small heath, they were clearly dingy skipper and in considerable numbers. There were also very brief sightings of a flying blue shape I thought to be a possible holly blue and a brief stop by a pale looking moth.
Unfortunately all were decidedly skittish and I had big difficulties getting any sort of a photo. So instead of visiting Ryton Meadows after I finished my shopping, I returned again in the afternoon.
By now it was really warm and the skippers were much more placid. In total I reckoned that I saw about thirty of the supposedly declining dingy skippers in all, some of which were clearly trying to mate.
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So I reported all this to the North East Butterfly Conservation website only to receive an instant message saying the sighting was noted but would not be displayed to members as it contained 'sensitive information.' All very John le Carré!
I also solved the mystery of the moth and the blue flying objects, which proved to be one and the same thing - a treble bar or perhaps more likely for a daytime appearance, lesser treble bar moth.
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| (Lesser) Treble Bar Moth |
In sunlit flight they do have a somewhat azure appearance, hence the illusion of holly blue.
What attracted me to the area was the abundance of bird's foot trefoil nearby, which also meant numerous red-tailed bumblebees were about, but interestingly no common blues.
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| Red-tailed Bumblebee |
Earlier on I had found a couple of items in the garden that I was able to tentatively identify as narrow-waisted wasps. Again these had the experts humming and hawing as to their precise identity in Latin. Though there is a clear difference between the two, in broad terms and plain English they are apparently potter wasps.
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On the Sunday I decided to check out the Calaminarian Grassland at Wylam to see if I could find the red-girdled mining bee there as suspected, and then proceeding to the Spetchells at Prudhoe in the hope of finally seeing my first ashy mining bee, which I had read is a bit of a rarity also with only about ten sightings a year - mainly by the River Tyne.
On arrival by bike I had no difficulty in finding bees buzzing around that had an amount of red on the abdomen and saw roughly around 20 examples, some larger and some smaller ones. The trouble was that they were all hyperactive and only landed so briefly a snapshot was near impossible.
The big surprise was that two or three times a very dark bee of near bumblebee proportions turned up behaving in a similar manner before jetting off at speed. When one did land it was unmistakeably - an ashy mining bee. In total I made about ten observations of an ashy bee but suspect at least some were the same individual.
I decided to take videos of both to enable proof of the identity of each. Unfortunately, feedback on the item with the red abdomen was that it was unidentifiable and more likely to be a member of the Sphecodes species (Latin for blood bee.)
Here are both videos so you can judge for yourself!
Ashy Mining Bee
Probable Blood Bee
I was well-pleased with my first ashy mining bee and blood bees are a known difficult area. It's also a pity that the second bee managed to spend all its time in the bug box under a slightly blurred area. However you can probably gather that I'm getting a bit fed up with the problems of insect identification.
Basically I learnt what I know about bees from CR, who was a brilliant populariser and encouraged one's attempts to identify them using everyday English names. Now I seem to only find amateur experts, clearly more knowledgeable than me, who complain about the quality of photos submitted, spout Latin terms that need to be looked up and frequently claim detailed identification is impossible.
I feel like telling them to tell they should give me their best opinion. After all my field guide suggests there are predominantly three species of blood bee in North East England - Geoffroy's, box-headed and sandpit so it's a fair bet that it was one of them. It would be no problem for me to explain that an identification is possible or probable rather than obscuring the issue with broad species types. It's as if they fear losing their expert status if they actually get an identification wrong once in a while.
Anyway I never bothered with the numerous nomad bees I saw at Wylam, knowing that a clear verdict was unlikely. I did see a couple of chocolate mining bees (andrena scotica for the Classics scholars) and a single, slightly worn holly blue butterfly.
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| Holly Blue |
It's so much simpler with butterflies - in the North East at least.
