In the second day of our wildlife series Springwatch’s Chris Packham and zoologist Megan McCubbin get their magnifying glasses out to reveal the wonder of the creepy crawlies that fly and scuttle around our gardens and parks during the Spring.
Here the naturalists also reveal top tips on how you can encourage wildlife to thrive in your own back garden...
Springtime insects
In your garden, even if you’ve just got a small garden and a shed, if you turn over a stone or a piece of old wood there’s a whole eco system going on.
You’ve got all of your carnivores and herbivores, it’s like the plains of the Seregeti and it’s under a log in your garden just a change of scale.
If you look at the jaws of a centipede and imagine the size they look to a woodlice, it’s a pretty terrifying animal.
A sure sign of Spring is bees.
And as a lot of the spring flowers are coming out, there are quite a few queen bumblebees about.
They have overwintered as adults - meaning they’ve made it through the winter - and they need fuel, so they’re going to flowers for nectar.
They will be looking for a mouse hole to start their nest this year.
You’ll see them buzzing around flowers but you’ll also see them going around any patches of bare soil and any little underground cavern - about the size of a fist -is the space they need.
Queens are larger than the bumblebees we get later on and they’re benign, you never have to worry about being stung by a queen bumblebee.
They can sting, but all of the eggs for this year’s colony are inside them so the last thing they want to do is get into any conflict with anyone in case they get killed. They’re really cuddly bees at this time of year.
White-tailed and buff-tailed bumblebee are other ones you’re likely to see at this time of year.
They’ll be buzzing around flowers if there’s any nectar.
The bee fly is another. They’re called that because they’re very fluffy and they are quite round but they have a very long sharp black needle sticking out of their face and they use this to sip the nectar from flowers with deep nectaries, like primroses.
So keep an eye on your primroses because they emerge at this time of year and they are amazing insects.
They are parasites, so the females will have a chamber in their backside which they deliberately fill with sand.
They glue their eggs to the sand and hover above the entrance holes of solitary bee nests, and they flick their eggs into the holes as they’re hovering.
It’s remarkable. If you spend 10 minutes near a bunch of primroses, then when it’s warm and sunny that’s when they’re active.
They behave a bit like a hover fly, they don’t fly like a bee. Google “bee fly egg laying”, it’s amazing.
Make a Bee Hotel
Help solitary bees like Mason bees, Leafcutter bees and Yellow-faced bees thrive by making your own bee hotel.
These bees nest in hollow stems, earth banks or old beetle holes in dead wood and aren’t aggressive, so they are fine around children and pets.
Solitary bees are different to honey bees and bumble bees, they don’t have a queen or hive, they live alone and they don’t produce honey.
Bees will cocoon themselves into your bee hotel and lay their eggs and larvae in there, you’ll see them poking their heads out.
There’s lots of ways you can make a bee hotel, either using a terracotta pot or you can buy alternatives online.
One of the easiest ways to do it without ordering anything new is using a mug.
Zoologist Hannah Stitfall showed us how to make a great bee hotel last week.
In your hotel, use grass and old hogweed stems - they have a little hole in - or use some bamboo and chop it up.
Put it in the mug and make sure it’s really well stacked and your nest cavities aren’t moving around.
The bees will come in and lay the egg right at the bottom of the nest cavity and go out to collect pollen and nectar and they lay it right at the end next to the egg ready.
Make sure there’s not a lot of movement and if your guest is a red Mason bee, they will come and block up the entrance to the cavity with mud.
If they’re a Leafcutter bee they’ll make a kind of leaf paste to block the entrance up with.
Don’t hang your bee hotel up, otherwise it will wobble in the wind.
Place it just off the ground and make sure it’s steady and somewhere that gets the morning sunshine.
Pitfall trap
If you make one of these you’re likely to find ground-dwelling invertebrates like beetles, woodlice, millipedes, centipedes, earwigs, springtails and spiders.
And it’s a great way to end up with a whole pile of invertebrates to look at in the morning.
If you’ve got a small amount of green space, all you need to do is get a yoghurt cartoon or a cup or mug, dig a hole as deep as the cup is and set it in there and keep the soil out of it.
It needs to be flat into the mud. You cover it over with something, a piece of bark or wood, and anything that’s moving around at night will find the shelter and fall into the trap in the carton.
Just make sure if it does rain you put a couple of holes in the bottom of the cup so they don’t drown.
Make sure you check in the morning or every few hours because there’s not much food in there.
These traps are a good way of getting an up close look at things and great for kids.
Otherwise they’d never see them because most of these inverts are nocturnal, so they wouldn’t realise they’ve got these creatures in their space.
Though if you get a centipede in there it’s likely to eat everything else...
