I've been hoping to see a Bee Chafer Trichus fasciatus for years, so I was delighted to finally chance across one on the foreshore at Cardiff Docks last week. I was actually looking for larval cases of an obscure micro-moth, Coleophora silenella, which feeds on Bladder Campion and in Wales is only known from this area. I failed to find any of these, but the beetle was ample compensation.
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| Trichus fasciatus sharing a Wild Carrot umbel with the soldier-beetle Rhagonycha fulva |
The bee chafer has a curiously disjunct distribution in the UK, see the map below (from the NBN Gateway). Many of the Glamorgan records are coastal (Kenfig, Baglan etc), which seems odd given that the larvae are said to be associated with old tree stumps.
Martin Bevan has been finding them (or the same one over and over) on a brownfield site near Aberdare, this summer. I went there and saw one, which was a thrill for me, as the only one I'd seen previously, was on another brownfield site, back in the nineties.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, we have Bladder Campion up here, on the former site of the Purnacite plant. It survives there, having been successfully eradicated from the verge it had occupied for over thirty years, by RCT's unsympathetic verge mowing regime. When I first discovered it on that verge, around thirty years ago, I collected some of the seed pods and sowed the seed in my garden, where it grew unhappily for a few years. I wasn't aware of micro moths then and wouldn't have known that Coleophora larval cases existed, but I do recall seeing frass and other evidence of something munching the seeds within the pods.
ReplyDeleteThe feeding signs on the seed pods may well have been due to one of the Hadena moths (Lychnis etc). I saw lots of feeding damage on the ones at Cardiff Docks, but nothing that looked like it was made by a Coleophora.
ReplyDeleteHad a Bee Chafer in Nantyffyllon on 23/7/15 George.
ReplyDeleteThere seem to have been quite a few around this year Paul. As well as the ones Mark mentions, I've heard of sightings at Kenfig and Tonyrefail too.
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