More Autumn news

 It has been a long time since my last post so this will be a bit of a catch up on  what has been popping up in the garden.  A few more fungi appeared in my lawn. There was the very common Fly Agaric

and some Peppery Bolete which has pores on the underside  rather than gills. The yellow end to the stalk is another characteristic. They are said to be edible but I've never tried them.

All mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the main part of the fungus which is a web of threads called the mycelium.  The Peppery Bolete is parasitic on the mycelium of the Fly Agaric so if you see one, look out for the other.

Another fungus  in the lawn

was identified for me by Chris Grimbly who posts on Bluesky as @chrishroom.bsky.social

I thought it was a Panther Cap but apparently the spots need to be whiter than my buff ones.  The deciding ID feature is to look at the stalk where there is a white ring (annulus) of floppy material.  If it has striations (little ridges) that confirms it is  a Blusher, which turns pink when bruised.

I have been picking my apples (many of which had been "stolen" and eaten by Jackdaws).  The Bramleys survived and  those with flaws were peeled and processed for the freezer.  The wasps loved the pile of peelings in the compost heap.

I was trying to get a photograph of the face of the wasp as that helps to identify the species.  Not easy as they were busy crawling about and I did not want to kill one.  This is the best I managed.

The black mark like an anchor on its face means it is a Common Wasp - that's it's name not a judgement! If you look here you can see the faces of the other kinds of wasp.

I also found a ladybird resting on one of the apples.  I don't see many ladybirds in spite of there being news items about plagues of ladybirds down south.

It's not a very good picture but instead of black spots it has smeary white ones. It is the Striped Ladybird or Myzia oblongoguttata which overwinters in birch and pine trees (which both grow near the apple tree.)

Wood, Wasps, and Seasonal Greetings

With Christmas and New Year taking up the end of December, I have not  done a blog post for a while.

But Happy New Year from me and this tree!

It's a Norway Spruce (Picea abies) which is the traditional Christmas tree, and this one was growing on the lower half of Newtonmore Golf Course.  The lower branches have been pruned to give room for the golfers and the tree then weeps resin. Seeing faces in the trees reminds me of Lord of the Rings and the Ents.

And a friend in New Zealand sent me this picture of a NZ  "Christmas tree", a Pohutakawa which has lovely red flowers at Christmas (their summer) and is festooned with lichens which look very similar to the UK ones.

Pohutakawa

 My son and his wife visited us for Christmas and having extra eyes when out for a walk was useful.  My son spotted this lichen (on a birch tree):

Ramalina fastigiata

It's not one I see often and not usually on a birch as it prefers trees with a less acidic bark.  It's the bushy looking one that's a pale green.  (The blue green lichen surrounding it is a Parmelia, probably Parmelia sulcata, which is very common and covers most of the local trees and hugs the bark quite closely.)

The Ramalina bushy lichen (Ramalina fastigiata) has discs at the end of each branch, that remind me of sink plungers! Maybe it should be called the Dalek lichen.  The discs are the fruiting bodies (apothecia) that produce spores.

Another discovery came when we had to find an extra suitcase in the loft for my son to take the Christmas presents back to Germany!  There was an abandoned wasp nest (byke).  They are amazingly delicate and I'm afraid I broke it before taking a picture.  The outer globe is made of paper which the wasps make from wood pulp. I see them in the summer chewing away at old wood.  The inside is a perfect set of hexagons surrounded by several layers of spherical globes.

 There is more detail at the Natural History Museum. It seems that the queen starts the nest and then when her eggs have hatched into new wasps, they take over the work and she just does the egg laying.

Well, that is what I read, but there is even more fascinating detail on the Countryfile web site

"But aren’t we taught in schools that only queens lay eggs? In fact, workers in almost all Hymenoptera (bee, wasp and ant) colonies can lay eggs. Because of a genetic quirk of the Hymenoptera, females hatch from fertilised eggs and males from unfertilised eggs. Worker wasps have lost the ability to mate, but can still lay male (unfertilised) eggs."

The wasp that we are familiar with is called the Yellowjacket (Vespula vulgaris) but there are an estimated 200,000 other species, most of which aren't interested in stinging humans.