UK Nature Blog

iPhone game - Honey Tribe: Colony Collapse

I was recently approached by the maker of an iPhone game asking if I'd like to review it here. Having played it intently on the train over the past few weeks, I can thoroughly recommend it and can confirm that it's definitely relevant to a nature blog!

Honey Tribe: Colony Collapse (iTunes link) is a delightful tale of a drone bee asked to save a colony suffering from colony collapse disorder. The game is a side scroller as our hero tries to collect pollen whilst evading many and varied threats. I was a bit confused at first that you can only control his movement up and town (touch to flap wings) as it wasn't completely obvious, but once I'd figured that out I was fine. A lot of its appeal is courtesy of its simple control scheme combined with fast pace and increasing challenges, making it easy to get into but hard to put down.

The graphics are hand drawn with a homespun charm and the music's apparently very good too but I didn't have headphones so I played it with the sound off! Woven into the game is an evolving story of the challenges faced by the hive, laced with facts about bees and their world. It's appropriate and fun for any age but children might especially like it and learn a little something too.

At £1.49 I recommend it. More information on iTunes app store or via the Honey Tribe website. A free LITE version is also available if you just want to give it a go.

Red admiral head on

You don't often see a buttefly's 'face' head on. Here is a Red admiral staring me down, and below is the same butterfly from a more usual angle. It's sitting on one of the very interesting walls at Butterfly World in Hertfordshire. More about that another time perhaps.

August nature notes

A few things I've noticed of late:

• Lots of ladybirds about, especially 7-spot.
• Garden full of Gatekeeper butterflies all of a sudden, often in pairs. This is their time of year apparently.
• Slugs and snails living it up in the recent boughts of wetness (and eaten all our courgette plants) though it's still fundamentally dry out there and some plants are struggling.
• I have a large wasp's nest in the hedge - about the size of a football. I think they're Median wasps, so not the usual sort: bigger but much less agressive and bothersome. I blogged about them once before when I saw a single wasp before I discovered the nest.
• I saw a Red kite circling above the garden lower than I've seen it before - probably just 50 feet up or so. Their successful comeback seems to continue apace.
• Smooth newts are easily terrified and they just freeze. They also looks just like little lizards. I found one crawling across my decking the other night - frozen stiff at my sudden appearance. The picture above is a pair I found on a previous occasion.
• Wasps of all sorts are particularly evident now. Presumably their numbers have swelled as they built up the size of their colonies over recent months. August is traditionally a waspy time of year and before long they'll be drunk on rotten apples.

Male Garden spider (Araneus diadematus)

I don't usually see the male of this species. You see the female Garden spiders in the autumn, often hanging in the middle of their big orb webs on your bushes, or hiding at the edge with one foot on a special strand of silk to detect vibrations.

The male has a much smaller abdomen and long, gangly legs compared to the female (or so it seems to me). This one was guarding my front door from the porch and actually pounced on my finger when I prodded its leg. It gave me quite a fright! The body is actually not much more than a centimetre long but those legs make it fairly intimidating. Here's a picture of a female for comparison purposes.

Ringlet butterfly

Having mentioned in my last post the dearth of butterflies, I've managed to find another one. This time, a Ringlet, with an unfortunate blurry blade of grass slightly ruining the photo. It's actually the more striking ringlet markings on the underwings that give it the name, so not visible in the photo above, but a good example is available if you follow the link.

 

Red Admiral

Amidst the birds on Farne I also saw just the one butterfly - a Red admiral. For some reason I don't see so many of these, and in fact it doesn't seem to have been a great year for butterflies in general, at least based on the number I've seen in my own garden.

Sexton beetle (burying beetle)

This handsome beast is a Sexton beetle. Also known as a "burying beetle" it senses a corpse (e.g. of a small rodent or bird) from a mile or more away with those combs on the end of the antennae, then digs beneath that corpse to bury it. Usually as part of a pair of beetles, it then tenderly raises its young using the corpse as a food source.

You can just see a small round, brown mite on this beetle's right eye, though it's a bit blurry. These are quite common and are thought not to parasitise the beetle directly, but to simply use it as transport between corpses. They may have a symbiotic relationship with the beetle, aiding in the management of the corpse by proving anti-fungicidal chemicals, but my brief research has thrown up a couple of slightly conflicting accounts.

A Dragonfly landed on my face

The title says it all. I sat outdoors eating a delicious scone observing a large dragonfly buzzing about overhead. It got remarkably close and I was just saying to my wife how you don't usually get to see them like that when it decided not to halt its approach and landed on my right cheek, just below my eye. I didn't entirely maintain my cool, having very much not expected that to happen. Sorry - no pictures, the wife just wasn't fast enough.

Nature notes - July 2011

Here's a few things I've noticed recently, now we've ticked over into July.

• Many a mushroom is growing in my lawn, big and small. I put this down to the recent heavy rainfall, but I'm only guessing. I'm sure they wouldn't normally be there at this time of year.
• The sheer variety of bees and wasps I'm seeing in my garden is staggering. Are they on the up or am I just noticing them more?
• Actually if you dig into the soil it's amazing to find that all the rainstorms haven't actually wet it more than a few inches down.
• When you've taught your daughter that birds go "tweet" it's gratifying to have a Chaffinch do exactly that in front of her - issuing a series of plaintive tweets and nothing more complicated.
• There just don't seem to be that many butterflies around so far this year.

Median wasp

There are many unusual wasps and bees in my garden. I swear I see something new every day! I needed to look up this one gnawing the wood off my shed, to find that it is apparently a Median wasp drone, the largest of the UK paper wasps apart from the Hornet. I could hear it scraping the wood and it was definitely a shade bigger than the average wasp. It's quite a sleek thing, being largely black with just the slivers of yellow - a designer wasp perhaps.

Intriguingly that linked page suggests that these wasps can be dissuaded from attacking your picnic with a wave of the arm, whereas that only agitates the more normal UK wasps.