Thursday 30 August 2012

Shirty - and waspy

I'm a bit distracted at the moment by the Paralympic Games which look set to be as much of a triumph as their Olympic predecessors. We have a particular interest because Susie Rodgers of the GB swimming team, aka The Suse Missile, was 'best girl' at our elder son's wedding.


Here is one of the said son's shirts, ironed by his loving Mum as he and our equally lovely daughter-in-law Abi are over here from Mexico, where they work, to support Susie. What a surprise: a moth has decided to perch on the shirt, a pretty little Single-dotted Wave, complete with its perversely many dots.

Also, I mentioned in the last post that we clambered up Roseberry Topping, and on the way back, we had a cream tea in Helmsley. We were sitting outside and, since cream teas involve jam, we were much-visited by wasps. Penny dealt with this by making a wasp decoy and placing it on a nearby (empty) table. You can see how well it worked.


The little red dots are interesting. I assumed they were footprints or other traces of messy wasps but Penny thinks that they are jammy wasp poos.

2 comments:

Cyren said...

How big are they?

The wasps, I mean.

MartinWainwright said...

Hi Cyren and very many apologies for the delay. I should always put a scale in - Penny keeps pointing this out. A UK wasp's body is seldom longer than 2 cms. Hornets, the next class up, can be substantially bigger; up to 3.5cms.

There's a good website called Waspinator which defends them against their many enemies (countless UK picnics have been spoiled by wasps!)

all v best

Martin