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in the damp grass. Other times they are a distant yelp, to remind me that they’re still a sizeable population in this part of deepest, darkest East Dulwich.Today, though, I find they’ve been raiding the food store. Luckily this isn’t really my larder, it

months hidden in hibernation in some dry secluded spot, the queens, with a store of sperm from autumn matings, venture out to an uncertain spring weather pattern, which is as unpredictable as any of the many other dangers they face from predators, disease

in autumn, just before disappearing into hibernation. It has been reported as being a physiological change, perhaps related to changes in the way nutrients are stored in their bodies over winter. But I've often wondered whether it might be an evolutionary

or in the flower pot store. With frogs and newts, that's three amphibians in the garden this year.

of mere academic interest, except that Liz's final question gripped my attention: "Does anyone want it?"My daughters had nagged me some years ago to get a pet snake. We'd even visited various exotic pet stores, but nothing ever came of it. Tentatively, I

go through this behaviour in autumn, and only the fertilised queens (females) survive through winter. In the 'solitary' species, the bees develop in their mainly subterranean nests, and although the grubs may finish feeding on the stored stocks

overfed garden spiders, Araneus diadematus, are sitting in stately plumpness in the centres.Several of the webs already have dead wasps stored in them, all spun around with silk. I am always slightly amazed that spiders are able to subdue such large

for this simple fact, and I was very quick to put them straight on it. [Technically, bumblebees do make an extremely small store (a few millilitres) of thin nectar regurgitation, but this is nothing like the huge stocks of thick, sterile, sweet gloop stored