On a wonderfully sunny morning in early May, looking for a suitable location for my PhD fieldwork, I discovered a flower patch near the ocean where the wonderful ‘triumvirate’ of Glebionis segetum, Silene uniflora, and Lotus creticus lured a wide range of pollinators. While recording the bumblebees foraging on the Lotus, I tried to ‘catch’ …
Morning time on a pleasant temperature summer day, I was watching the cloud of buzzing insects around flowering coffee trees (Coffea sp.) while others were harvesting grapes beside me. Like so many times before, I tried to count how many different insect taxa I could identify around the flowers. I did not have to work …
At the end of summer, most of the fly species found in our garden chose the overripe fruits of the fig tree as their favourite food. However, it seemed a Sarchophaga fly did not want to share this resource with the others. It tried to keep its competitors away by spreading its legs out to the …
One day in late summer, we were picking the matured figs at the back of our garden and our harvest was accompanied by louder-than-usual buzzing sounds. Around the overripe figs flew a lot of insects and landed on these already opened fruits: honey bees (Apis mellifera) and some fly species, such as the locust blowfly …