Banana Jelly!

Photos taken:
2022/07/16

The UK had an extremely bad heatwave this year, which among lots of other bad stuff happening like the countryside catching fire, also made my bananas turn to mush! Truly I have suffered the most out of anyone this summer.

Rather than throw the bananas away I decided to try making beetle jelly, which is a sweet treat people normally make for their pet beetles. It's pretty easy to make, I just mashed up the bananas and mixed in golden syrup and left-over jam for some extra sugar. After that you just boil the mixture in a saucepan, stir in some cornflour to help bind it together, and then let it set for a while.

I probably didn't boil the mixture for long enough because it didn't set into a jelly properly and just ended up being a sloppy liquid, but it made a nice treat for the bugs nonetheless!

Collage of three photos of a common yellow and black wasp. In the first image the wasp is perched on the lip of a plastic pot full of banana jelly and is taking a sip. The jelly is yellowish in colour and very runny. In the second two photos, a wasp is sitting on top of the jelly which has now been spread on some wood. Just barely visible in the photos are the tiny hairs lining the wasp's body.

The first customer of the day was this wasp who didn't even wait for me to set the pot down before eating! She was so absolutely lost in the sauce that she dove straight into the jelly and swam around for a bit before climbing back out to clean herself up.

Eventually I got a chance to spoon out the jelly and slather it on some logs where it ended up being very popular! At one point there was about seven wasps all munching at once! Those hardworking ladies deserve a treat!

Next up I put some in the dirt for the ants. It's very hard to get clear pictures because they're just too small for my phone's camera, but they seemed to really enjoy it at least. Even a few days later ants were still happily munching away.

I've since worked out where the entrance to the ants' nest is so I might lay some there next time I make jelly. Our hardworking ant families deserve a treat too!

Collage of four photos of lots of red ants munching on the jelly. The photos are blurry because ants are too small, but they seem to be having a nice time. One of the ants is sitting on a flower petal and eating from the edge of the jelly.

A wide variety of flies came down as well! Like the ants most flies are too small for me to take photos of, but this green bottle fly stayed around long enough for me to get fairly clear pictures of it, and just look how pretty it is!

Close up photo of a common green bottle fly sitting on the jelly and sucking it up using its proboscis. The photo shows the fly mostly from a side view, providing a good look at its metallic green abdomen. A thin white stripe around the back edge of the fly's red compound eyes is also visible.

I'll never not be amazed at the existence of iridescent bugs; what a ridiculously cool thing to evolve! I hope I get to have metallic skin one day...

I'm particularly happy with this photo because I not only managed to get a good look at the white line around the fly's eyes, but also managed to capture its straw-like proboscis sucking up the banana slop. Flies don't have any form of teeth so they normally regurgitate digestive enzymes onto their food to liquify it before slurpin' it up like a milkshake, but there was probably no need for that here; the banana jelly really was that runny.

Just like our wasps and ants, our hardworking fly population deserves a treat too! Thanks, flies!

And that's all the photos I got. Ironically the beetle jelly didn't manage to attract any beetles, but tbh I have a hard time finding beetles in the garden to begin with. Maybe the area I live in just doesn't have many, or maybe the garden just doesn't have the right plants and environments to attract them idk. I'll have to look into that.

For now, if you have any bananas that are getting a bit manky, please consider making some jelly for all the hardworking bugs in your life. They really do deserve a treat.