August Bugs

The sun has arrived! Unlike last month where it rained almost every day, August has been warm and dry enough for most of the regular summer bugs to come out, so there was a lot more activity in the garden.

First up, frogs are back in the pond! Yahoo! This frog looks similar to the one I named Crouton last year but it seems like there are lots of frogs around my neighbourhood, travelling from garden to garden, so they might be a different one entirely. I'll name them Prongle for now.

Photo of a dark green frog poking its head out of a pool of water.

This is a Peacock butterfly. They have absolutely beautiful red forewings, featuring four large and bright eyespots that shine like water droplets in the sunlight. Their hindwings on the other hand resemble a very crispy leaf, which is the only part I managed to get photos of.

The hindwings are still very cool though; I like the crinkly bottom-edges and the wavy black lines running up and down them.

A butterfly feeding from some lilac-coloured flowers. The butterfly's wings are mostly black with a few patches of yellow, and has dark wavy lines running across them.

Continuing on with more lepidoptera is this black spiny caterpillar. I'm not sure what this is, but it would make a great soft toy. Very fluffy. Just barely visible in the photo is the yellow/orange line that ran down the caterpillar's whole body. The dense spines made it difficult for the camera to capture much detail, but it was much more detailed in person.

A very hairy black caterpillar crawling up a log. Just barely visible is its head which has two pin-like legs at the front.

This is a Privet Hawkmoth Caterpillar, which is apparently the UK's largest resident hawkmoth. This guy certainly lived up to their reputation; they were absolutely huge, and colourful too! Those pink and white toothpaste stripes are very striking.

A bright green caterpillar with pink and white stripes running up its side and a sharp point at the end of its body.

In addition to being colourful and huge, they were also very speedy. I took some footage so please enjoy this cronched-up gif of them wrigglin' around.

Short animated clip of the caterpillar moving. It crawls around with a happy jaunt.

The way these Sweet Pea flowers open means bugs really have to squeeze themselves in to feed on nectar, which is the perfect opportunity for getting close-up photos of bees. It's been a while since I studied botany, but I think you can see some of the flower's stamen rubbing pollen all over the bee.

A bee feeding from a pink flower. One of the flower's curved stamen is brushing pollen onto the bee's back.

And finally I had to take a picture of this other bee simply because of how fluffy its front legs were. They're like mittens!