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fluttered in and deposited eggs. These hatched into caterpillars, which then proceeded to demolish the cabbages. (For future reference this is best avoided by covering the developing cabbages with horticultural fleece, through which the butterflies cannot

the bumblebee nest and hangs around outside for a few days to pick up its scent. Once she has done this, she enters the nest undetected to lay her eggs. These hatch into caterpillars, which start off by eating the nest debris before moving to the wax pots

Earwigs, which can be up to 14mm long, hide during the day and emerge at night to feed. The females lay eggs in late-winter, usually in the soil, which hatch in spring. Although earwigs can damage plants, they also eat small pests and their eggs

Nesting female bees cut out immediately obvious elliptical shapes from the edges of a leaf to make their cells for laying eggs. Since one female might need 20 or so cells, that's a lot of leaf cutting, particularly when the bee keeps returning

, but with its obvious pale cream coloration it was fooling no one.We usually get two sawflies laying their eggs. Arge pagana is the pale speckled caterpillar that skeletonises whole branches, while Blennocampa phyllocolpa is the small green leaf

for Ornithology (BTO) research suggests it could be related to the changing nesting behaviour of its hosts, plus a decline of available food (caterpillars). Cuckoos usually lay their eggs in the nests of dunnocks, meadow pipits, pied wagtails and reed warblers

wing-tip to wing-tip is striped orange and white and quite pretty under a lens.It had been spreading across Europe from its first discovery in Macedonia in the middle of the 20th century and arrived in the UK in Wimbledon in 2002. I first noticed

are unlikely to find on the shelves of your local garden centre. It was the chemical used in the first aerial crop dusting experiment in 1921, when it was used to control caterpillars on catalpa trees (crop dusting was dramatised in Hitchcock's North

completely different foodplants. Butterflies in the spring emergence lay their eggs on holly and their caterpillars feed on the developing buds. When these insects reach adulthood in late-summer they lay their eggs on ivy flower buds. At least

. The first is relatively straightforward: the mullein moth caterpillar. These are stripy chaps that start quite skinny, but rapidly become as fat as witchity grubs by eating verbascum leaves at a terrifying rate. I grow the gorgeous Verbascum bombyciferum