Blogspot - Interia Dezain

A beetle from the Scarabaeidae family Wandering around the garden this morning I brushed past a Tamarisk branch sending a flurry of winged insects into the air.  The plant is always stunning at this time of year, each branch adorning candy floss pink flowers, but until today I hadn't realised the enormous diversity of insects that the plant attracts. A brief count up revealed at least eight different species, some nectar feeding, others hunting the nectar feeders, all seemingly as mesmerized as I was in this spectacular plant. Robber Fly - Asilidae (i think ) Eristalis tenax - European Hoverfly As well as being a good biodiversity plant, Tamarisk branches can be used for basketry, the nectar is forage for honey bees and the plant is relatively unique it that it can tolerate saline soils and actually concentrates salt within the plant. This makes Tamarisk a good choice for planting around gray water outlets. Overtime, gray water systems often accumulate salts in the surrounding so...

Welcome to part two of a series of posts looking at a range of beneficial organisms commonly known as bugs, critters or creepy crawlies that can contribute to a healthy, productive and pest free growing environment in your temperate garden ( For part one click here ) . As well as identifying key species that serve as allies to our efforts in the garden, we will look at ways to attract and keep these organisms around. Here we look at the different types of wasps we commonly interact with in the garden and although it may sound bizarre to want to encourage wasps, they do us a great service . The wasps are insects placed in the order Hymenopteran, along with bees and ants amongst others. This is a huge order containing over 40,000 known species in Europe alone, and is the only order that we find truly social insects (termites are the exception). I have selected three superfamilies of wasps to talk about here that highlight the behavioral diversity of these organisms as solitary hunt...