Rough Hawkbit (Crepis biennis)

Dear Readers, you might remember that I’m growing a mini-meadow in a windowbox for the East Finchley Festival on Sunday. Largely, things are going pretty well – the selfheal and the rough hawkbit are both in flower, with yarrow and meadow vetchling not far behind. However, there’s something very interesting going on on the goatsbeard (I will be giving it a good wash before it’s put on the stall on on Sunday).

You can see that the ants have been hard at work, moving the black aphids around. The aphids have been producing barrel-loads of honeydew, you can see it caked on the leaves and forming a kind of sugar crust on some areas of the stem (above).

But wait, what is this?

This tiny blue and red insect is a jewel wasp (Chrysis ignita species). I only wish that my camera could have caught the true brilliance of this tiny creature, with its turquoise thorax and bright red abdomen. You would have thought it was made of molten metal.

Jewel wasps are actually cuckoo wasps – they lay their eggs in the nests of other insects, usually other wasps or mason bees. This is a dangerous way of carrying on, as you can imagine, so the wasp has a number of defences – it has a hollow stomach, which means that it can roll up into a tight ball if attacked by an angry bee, and it also has a sting, though this is not venomous, so it ‘stabs’ an attacker, but can’t poison it.

You can see the jewel wasp in flight bottom right of the photo.

At first I wondered if the wasp was planning on munching on the aphids, but after a while I realised that it was much more interested in the honeydew – the ants who were ‘farming’ the aphids didn’t like this, and would drive the wasp off whenever it tried to land. Eventually the wasp gave up and sat on a self-heal leaf for a bit. In the photo below you can make out that shiny red bottom.

What fascinates me is how a tiny collection of ten meadow plants can become an ecosystem in just a few weeks, and this was after less than twenty minutes observation. Who knows what else goes on? And I am full of questions – why is only the goatsbeard covered in aphids, and everything else looks fine? Are these the same ants that have recently put in an appearance on my living room floor? And what will happen after I’ve washed the aphids off? I shall keep you posted…