Stick insects

Insects use many devices to protect themselves from preditors, one is disguise.

Stick insects mimic the shape of the plants they live on.  these ones rest close to the stems of their food plants and virtually disappear.

These stick insects are all female, they lay fertilised eggs and these can be collected up and hatched out.  They eat privet leaves.  I started out with one fully grown insect and one younger one and now have about 7.

Mysterious chrysalis

Over the years when digging in the soil i have found red shiny chrysalis, when they are held in the hand they wiggle.  I have often wondered what would hatch out of them.  I found one recently and popped it into a container and waited.  It hatched into a moth called a Yellow underwing.  The moth itself  looks brown when resting but once it flies it displays a yellow underwing.

The chrysalis after hatching.

The brown upper surface of the moth.

The underwing visible.  The photos are a bit blurry, my camera isn't up to the job.

Bloom 2011

On Friday 6th class had a day trip to Bloom, the food and garden exhibition in the Phoenix Park.  It was a scorching hot day and we all arrived in the beautiful park courtesy of Laverty Coaches.

We split into three groups and Mrs Dunne, Amanda and I had a group of children each.  Off we headed to see as much as we could in the short time we had.

Here are my group enjoying the day.

Butterfly

Here is a speckled wood butterfly, it uses the clever device of having "eye" patterns on its wings.  This fools a preditor into aiming for these rather than the insects head. Many insects use trickery to avoid being eaten.  Some mimic the appearance or colours of a poisonous insect or disguise themselves as twigs or leaves.

Photo by Diane Purtell.

Fledgling sparrows

Here we can see a male house sparrow feeding his young.  We can tell it is a male as he has a black "bib" on his chest. This photo was taken by Diane Purtell in her garden.

Wasps nest

Mrs Dunne found this wasps nest in her garden shed. It is a work of art and a thing of beauty.
These wasps are social insects, that means that they live in a group.  What happens is in early spring a young fertilised queen wasp wakens from hibernation and looks for a suitable nesting site, like inside a shed, in a hole in a tree, or some other dry place.  The queen looks for some wood, like a fence, shed, dry stem of a dead plant and using her strong mouth rasps the wood.  You can hear this on a quiet day.  She chews this and makes a strong stem on the roof of her selected site.  She builds a few cells and lays an egg in each downward pointing cell.  Before the larvae hatch the queen surrounds the cells with a tiny shell of wasp paper leaving only a tiny flight hole on the bottom.  The queen feeds the larvae on well  chewed caterpillars and flies.  After about 2 weeks the larvae spin a top to its cell and pupate.  These hatch into worker wasps and take over the nest building, cell making duties and leave the queen to lay eggs.  They enlarge the nest to the size we see here. By late summer there may be thousands of wasps in the colony.  Adult wasps eat only sweet things, such as nectar, honeydew (secreted by greenfly) and ripe fruit.  Young larvae eat chewed up live food.  As the summer progresses larger cells are constructed in which male wasps and queens are raised. These leave the nest and mate and the fertilised queens eat well and prepare to hibrnate.
Meanwhile back at the nest, the old queen stops laying, and the workers with nothing to do gorge on any sweet things they can find.  They can become a nuisance around bins, in orchards etc. The old queen slowly dies of starvation and as autumn approaches the other wasps die also. This just leaves the hibernating fertilised queens to start the process in early spring

Here you can see the internal structure of the nest.  Its built with pillars to keep the different layers apart.

The nest is as big as a large football. The secateurs show the scale.

A close up of some cells showing the cap on the cell.

My house martin family.

The school blue tits have fledged and left the nest.  My housemartins (Martin and Suzie) have just finished their nest so pretty soon they will be laying eggs.

This is the nest a couple of weeks ago and one bird in the nest.

Pair of birds in nest.

Building work in progress, one bird in the nest, the entrance hole is being closed.

All done! See how small the entrance is. This will keep the nest warm and the wind out.  The nest is on a south facing wall so it will be warmed by the sun.

My next door neighbour, Michaela has a nest on the front of her house too.