Getting stuck in....

My first task was a trip into town to have my phone looked at. The 'guru' spent some time examining the handset, but concluded that the memory was corrupted, so a new phone was the only option. Fortunately it was fairly straightforward to get it up and running, as I had backed up the old one before I tried to update it. My only remaining issue seems to be with e-mail.

Much of the rest of the day was spent finishing my identifications and data entry. In the end we made over 1000 records of 457 different species including quite a few new vice-county records - not a bad effort for two days! Once again, photography took a back seat. My main image is one of the many honey bees that are busy in the garden at the moment.

My extra shows a rather smart little shield bug that Pete found on his afternoon expedition. Often referred to as the Woundwort shieldbug, Eysarcoris venustissimus is a small greenish-grey species. The head and the front of both the pronotum and scutellum are copper coloured, while the connexivum is marked with black and white. There is one generation per year; the nymphs feed on hedge woundwort and sometimes other plants in the Lamiaceae such as black horehound, which is what these were on .New adults may be found from August onwards. Although rare in the 19th century, this shieldbug is now widespread in southern and central Britain as far north as Yorkshire, in hedgerows and woodland edges.