Wednesday 22 June 2016

Day 22 #30DaysWild - garden pests or not?

Today on my tour around the garden I spotted these aphids all lined up on just one of my Scabious plant stems, the other stems were all clear today anyway, I will have to watch out for them again tomorrow,! I am just hoping a ladybird or two will find them now, but I haven't seen too many of those this month.


Also today I spotted this caterpillar munching away on a buddleia leaf, I didn't know what type of caterpillar it was, I have a butterfly caterpillar ID book, and it wasn't in there so I had decided it was a moth caterpillar, but as I am still struggling with several moth IDs there is no way I am up to looking at their caterpillar stage too, so I posted a photo of it on one of the UK butterfly and moth groups on facebook and had a reply within five minutes telling me it is a Mullein Moth, this is really good news as we have never had a Mullein moth in our garden trap  so a new garden species.
They feed on buddleias which isn't necessarily such good news, except the leaves I found this one on are actually on stems we cut off our buddleia a few weeks ago and we are using as pea sticks in our vegetable beds, a long way from our buddleia plant, we are also thinking of replacing our buddleia after it has flowered this summer so even if more are found on our buddleia this year it won't be too much of a problem!
Mullein moth caterpillar 

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