Promoting & Enhancing The Natural Beauty of the Sid Valley
Insects are amazing in their diversity and range, there are insects found in almost every habitat that supports life: they live in the soil, in streams and ponds, on plants, high in the mountains, there are even insects that live in the Antarctic. TheRead More
Leave a comment People are alarmed by them, which is not surprising when what looks like a giant wasp is buzzing around trying to escape through the window, but our native hornets would rather get away from humans and are valuable part of our biodiversity. The largestRead More
Leave a comment July is the month where, if you walk through a meadow, you hope to see insects pinging left and right to get out of your way. In the daytime these are most likely to be grasshoppers, but we have plenty of crickets and bush-cricketsRead More
Leave a comment If you are out and about as summer progresses you might notice the tops of tall grasses and other plants such as nettles wrapped into a ball by spider web. This will probably be the nest of one of our remarkable spiders the NurseryRead More
Leave a comment I was delighted to see plenty of insects along the hedgerows of Laundry Lane in Sidford this week. It shows that some of the efforts to make space for nature are working. One group of insects I was pleased to see were small, blackRead More
Leave a comment We have a new bumblebee on the block, the tree bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum) has arrived from Europe, probably because of climate change. First seen in Wiltshire in 2001, in the next twenty years they spread throughout England and Wales and well into Scotland. TheRead More
Leave a comment You rarely see them, unless you go poking about under rotten logs, but millipedes are very important creatures. They can damage plant roots sometimes but generally they are nature’s tidy uppers. The technical term is detritovores, they feed on detritus or dead materials inRead More
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Sometimes when we are sold a solution to a problem we have to make sure that the solution doesn’t become the next problem. We need to take a look at some of our chemical uses. DDT is an effective insecticide with low mammalian toxicityRead More
Leave a comment Social wasps belong to the Hymenoptera, one of the major orders of insects which has the largest number of species than any of the other orders in Britain. The approximately 7,000 species of British Hymenoptera include, as well as the social wasps, the solitaryRead More
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