Identifications

Many thanks to Diary reader Hywel Lloyd for sending a link to the recent post about bees (see here) to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, where Anthony McCluskey, one of their Outreach Officers, was kind enough to identify this bee as "either a buff-tailed bumblebee or white-tailed bumblebee (it’s not always possible to separate the workers of these two species)", confirmed that the top bee was a honey bee, and named the remaining ones as common carder bees.

Meanwhile both Les Humphries and Plantaholic Sheila (who is as frustrated as all the rest of us at Google's system for commenting - sorry Sheila) have identified the striped caterpillar in this morning's post as that of the emperor moth.  Many thanks to both.