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If you have a garden in the UK, at a conservative estimate there'll be 500 species around now that you might reasonably see. There is a lot going on and much of that can be summed up in one word – reproduction. If ever an insect was representative of the wondrous, abundant, hell-for-leather world of the summer invertebrate, it'd have to be the common red soldier beetle. It lives a brief life in which it eats and has sex. It doesn't travel far, with no ambitions other than those mentioned. The flower heads of the plants known as umbellifers are a mecca for insects. Of all the umbel-dwellers, the common red soldier beetle is surely the most obvious lothario, colloquially called the 'hogweed bonking beetle'. They might…
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The Simple Things (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024