Insects Archives - Garden Design Sussex

Planting for a Butterfly Garden

Seeing butterflies flitting around is one of the joys during the summer months. If you are considering a butterfly garden when landscaping your outdoor space, the plants butterflies prefer tend to be ones which are easy to grow. Attracting butterflies in to your garden can be reassuring too, as they are good indicators of a healthy environment. They will also pollinate your flowers and help attract birds to your garden looking for food. Plants for a Butterfly Garden When landscaping a butterfly garden, you need to consider the larva stage of their life cycle as well as the adult stage. [...]

By Andrew Staib|2021-06-03T11:02:26+01:00July 13th, 2020|Flowers, Front Gardens, Garden Art, Insects|Comments Off

Planting to Attract Bees in to Your Garden

The gentle buzz of the bee in the garden is a quintessential spring and summer sound. By pollinating plants and fruit they also provide gardeners an invaluable service while they flit between flowers. However, the number of bees in the UK has seen a dramatic decline in recent times, a fact which should concern us all. When landscaping your garden or when planning this year’s planting scheme, there are a number of ways to help attract these vital pollinators. Image by shell_ghostcage from Pixabay Planting Native Species First and foremost, you will want to grow a variety of plants which can provide nectar [...]

By Andrew Staib|2021-06-03T11:02:12+01:00April 1st, 2020|Articles, Blog, Flowers, Garden Art, Insects|Comments Off

Spider Webs

Quite a few people have asked me why there are so many spiders this year and why they are so big. A warm summer will increase the availability of food sources allowing them to put on more weight. The other reason is that as the Autumn has been so warm they haven't felt the need to go indoors and hibernate. So the males are still roaming around looking for females. Notes on Webs. Did you know that the tensile strength of spider webs is actually stronger than steel cables. Also a spider has at least three different types of [...]

By Andrew Staib|2019-03-28T18:32:08+00:00November 9th, 2014|Blog, Insects|Comments Off

ants and aphids

Some species of ants "farm" aphids, protecting them on the plants they eat, eating the honeydew that the aphids release from the terminations of their alimentary canals. This is a "mutualistic relationship". These "dairying ants" "milk" the aphids by stroking them with their antennae.[Note 1][21] Some farming ant species gather and store the aphid eggs in their nests over the winter. In the spring, the ants carry the newly hatched aphids back to the plants. Some species of dairying ants (such as the European yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus)[22] manage large "herds" of aphids that feed on roots of plants in the ant colony. Queens that are leaving to start a [...]

By Andrew Staib|2020-05-12T13:17:06+01:00July 23rd, 2014|Blog, Insects|Comments Off