Ending of June

The weather has turned in the last couple of days to heavy showers, but it has been lovely and sunny. In between taking my daughter to a riding competition (last weekend) and the bee incident, I did manage a few photos here and there.

I have been enjoying our ‘meadow’ of lovely long grass in the back garden. Lots of insects seem to be enjoying it too.

Today, in between the showers I popped out for a moment and noticed this little bee who seems to have moved into a hole in our shed. Yay 🙂

The Buddleia won’t be long now – so close to flowering! So looking forward to all the butterflies gathering when it does 🙂

There are a lot of Ragwort plants which are also getting close to flowering. Last year these were particularly popular with hoverflies and the Small Copper butterflies. Another one to look forward to.

We were looking at the pond and commenting that we hadn’t seen the frogs for a while … I then stood up to pull some grass out of the pond and my foot disturbed … guess what?! Yup, a little yellowish frog went sploshing into the pond out of the way of my foot. He then popped back up to say hello. He’s pretty small. We thought he was a baby, but then an even smaller one popped up next to him! Really makes us happy to see our pond in use 🙂

There are all different stages of Ladybird life around the garden at the moment …

Here’s a larva (this is what hatches from the Ladybird eggs):

Then after stuffing itself with food, the larva settles down and turns into a pupa:

And then of course it becomes an adult ladybird, and sets off chomping its way through lots of greenfly 🙂

Finally, we are glad that we’ve let some of the brambles stay, as they are now producing the start of a nice crop of blackberries 🙂