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Just outside the back door is a lanky tuft of Veronicastrum virginicum. It's a good bee flower, with honeybees and bumbles visiting often. And this is the third year in a row that we have had a fasciated flower on it.I remember, very clearly

with sunbathing beasts: shieldbugs, spiders, ladybirds, bees, and two cats nestled in at the bottom. The newts have returned to the pond too; four of them were swimming about in there. These are the regular denizens of my garden, but two unusual visitors were a

completely forgotten about them when they arrived last week. Roses do very well in London, and so too do the insects that feed on them.Apart from the leafcutter bees, which cut out those beautiful semicircles, the insects I most associate with roses

We have a bumblebee nest in our compost bin. I first noticed a month ago when the first few workers started coming and going. Now we have a steady stream. The bees are buff-tailed, Bombus terrestris, one of our commonest species.I've told the family

with soldierfly and robberfly, but they retain bee-fly rather than the bovine-sounding beefly. Dung beetle is two words. The trouble with dung flies is that it invites the reposte: only if you throw it.

, and the warm weather. And that weather has already brought forth its first worshippers. Within minutes of exploring the garden we are buzzed by a bee-fly, Bombylius major, that perfect herald of spring as it bobs its hovering flight over the red dead nettle

in an old disused sandpit I guess I will never discover, nor how long it had been there.It is much too big for the local foxes to bother with, but I have already seen a solitary bee, an Andrena species, sunning itself on the forehead, and ants have been

, then this is the creature. But, sadly, it is just 'one of the ichneumons', which is quite frankly pathetic. Ichneumons are large and striking insects, allied to bees, wasps and ants. (Ichneumon is also another name for the Egyptian mongoose but we don't get those in East

bees, bluebottles and hoverflies, but the overwhelming majority of visitors are wasps. Both of the common species are here, Vespula vulgaris and V. germanica and most of them are males. It takes me a couple of minutes to work this out; it’s something

-footed bee hovered briefly outside the kitchen.I've just been wandering about the garden in my shirtsleeves, feeling the real warmth of the sun catch me, and it seems that all the wildlife has just been queuing up ready for this sunshine. The trouble is, I