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After watching Heston Blumenthal’s Victorian Feast, I decided to get a book he referred to, ‘Why Not Eat Insects?‘ by Vincent Holt.

The Common Woodlouse, Oniscus asellus, an ingredient for a delicious sauce? I kid you not... (I know it's not an insect, but it's included in the book as you'll soon read!)

It is a quaint little book which was written to enrich the diets of the poor and is composed of 99 pages, which are divided into three sections: the first, ‘Why Not?’, gives arguments for eating herbivorous insects; the second, ‘Insect Eaters’, provides examples of insects eaten in antiquity and those nations, in modern times, which are called uncivilized; and the third, ‘Insects Which Are Good To Eat, And Something About Their Cooking’, gives some recipes and suggested menus. One such menu is:

Menu

Snail Soup
Fried Soles, with Woodlouse Sauce
Curried Cockchafers
Fricassée of Chicken with Chrysalids

Boiled Neck of Mutton with Wireworm Sauce
Ducklings, with Green Peas
Cauliflowers garnished with Caterpillars
Moths on Toast

Whilst some recipes (of sorts) are given, you are not told how to prepare moths on toast. I wonder which moths he was suggesting make a suitable cheese subsitute… As you can see from the delightful menu above, Holt does cover other invertebrates in the book, including molluscs and spiders.

Bear with me here, but I’m almost tempted to try the woodlouse sauce, because Holt writes the following:

I have eaten these, and found that when chewed, a flavour is developed remarkably akin to that so much appreciated in their sea cousins. Wood-louse sauce is equal, if not distinctly superior to, shrimp.

My family were slightly less enthusiastic about trying some of the recipes, but I am sure some of you are more adventurous! Recipes will follow…

Reference:
Holt, V.M. (2007) WHY NOT EAT INSECTS? Whitstable, Pryor Publications Whitstable and Walsall.
Note: The original was book was published in 1885. The version I have is a fascimile.

These photos are slightly delayed because I formated my computer over the weekend, replaced some parts and switched from taking jpegs to raw images. The aquisition of a larger capacity memory card and hard drive has meant that storage space is less of a concern, at least for now!

I posted the bee photos on Flickr a few days ago, hoping that some of my contacts would help with identifications, which they did – thanks Tristan.

I saw two species of Adrena but have yet to identify them, and one species of bumblebee, Bombus terrestris. Aside from some Diptera, this was all that I encountered.

Andrena sp. on lesser celandine. This was a very small bee, around 5-7mm.

Another Andrena sp. (male). There were a lot of these in the same place, on the bark of the tree and around the surrounding earth. At one point there were over ten of them.

If the weather is good tomorrow I will visit Langdon Hills again.

As I recently had my first encounter with the eggs of the Vapourer moth, I thought I would write a little about its interesting life history.

Unlike most other moths, males of Orgyia antiqua fly during the day (often relatively highly) and are sometimes mistaken for butterflies (Waring and Townsend, 2006). The females are also unusual because they have no wings and remain on the cocoon from which they hatch. Eggs are laid on the cocoon, overwinter, and hatch from May onwards.

Orgyia antiqua life stages: eggs (left), caterpillar (middle) and copulating adults © Tristan Bantock (right). See below for Flickr links to larger images.

After reading about the moth and looking its life stages, I remembered/realised that our apple tree gets eaten by them every year! I will look for the adults this year, which should be easier now that I know what I’m looking for.

Flickr links: Eggs, caterpillar and adults © Tristan Bantock

Reference:
Waring, P. and Townsend, M. (2006) Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland. Dorset, British Wildlife Publishing

Update (18th March): Thanks to Tristan Bantock, I now know that these are the eggs of the Vapourer moth, Orgyia antiqua.

I might keep some of the eggs and see if I can rear them through to adults.

It was nice and warm the last two days, so on Monday I went insect hunting in the garden and took a few photos. When I got home from work today it was much colder and overcast, so I wasn’t expecting to see much, and didn’t plan to go looking.

As I put my bicycle away, something caught my eye:

Mystery Eggs! They are less than 1mm in diameter.

These are now in an insect pot and I am hoping that they will hatch soon. I should be able to get the name of the plant that I found the eggs on, which may help with an identification.

What do you think laid them? I think they look a bit like Heteoropteran bug eggs.

My weekend has been very busy.

On Friday night I cooked for my family; as usual, cooking new dishes meant I was a little late in serving (I made a shallot compote and I used rather large shallots which took longer to cook than I anticipated!) but I think it was worth the delay!

On Saturday we had an early start to go into London and buy a dedicated macro lens for my camera. My Flickr friends recommended getting a Sigma 105mm, so now I can take reasonable photos at a much further distance than I could previously. Once I get some extension tubes I hope to take photos of smaller insects, like leafhoppers and ants.

After buying the lens I went into the museum to try the camera out:

An unidentified Cercopid taken using a Sigma 105mm Macro lens © The Natural History Museum

Very shortly I will be leaving to visit Wicken Fen and shall go insect hunting with the new lens. I’ll post some new photos and the photos I took last weekend soon.

Langdon Hills is the country park that I visited most when I was younger, so I am fairly familiar with it. When I started thinking about good locations for regular insect hunts it seemed like a logical choice.

Langdon Hills is situated in Essex, close to the town of Basildon, and is composed of two areas known as One Tree Hill and Westley Heights. I looked through some local history books at work and managed to find some information on the formation of the park and preservation of the surrounding land.

Back in the late 1960s, as the government was planning the expansion of housing in Basildon, there were a number of housing neighbourhoods removed from original plans due to opposition by residents who were defending the beauty spots and land around the park (Lucas, 1991). In 1989 the Essex Naturalist Trust took over management of Langdon Hills countryside and made it a nature reserve following a large donation from Herbert Langdon Dowsett. Currently, Langdon Hills is managed by the Thurrock Ranger Service.

Last Sunday was my first visit of the year. I took only my camera with me and soon wished that I had taken some collecting containers and trays. Whilst searching through the leaf litter I saw some interesting beetle larvae, but they were moving too fast to photograph.

Although the weather has been getting better there were few flowers out, but I did see the bluebells poking through the earth getting ready to flower.

I did see some interesting bee behaviour, with seven or more individuals (of what looked like the same species) investigating an area of bare ground next to a tree. The bees occasionally wrestled when one got too close to another, but they didn’t seem overly aggressive towards each other.

I expect that I will see many more insects at the park in a week or so.

There should be some accompanying photos soon.

Reference:
Lucas, P. (1991) Basildon. Sussex, Phillimore & Co. Ltd.

On Sunday I watched the first episode of an excellent cooking program, Heston’s Feasts, presented by the famous chef, Heston Blumenthal. The series covers four culinary time periods to produce adventurous dishes from unusual, forgotten and innovative ingredients and recipes.

The time period for the first episode was Victorian Britain and Blumenthal used Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ as the inspiration behind his dishes.  The Victorian feast started with a deceptive uniformly pink drink, composed of different layers of flavour-infused milk (cherry pie, custard, hot buttered toast, pineapple, toffee and turkey). This was followed by mock turtle soup (made from the head of a calf) and an entirely edible garden, before culminating with a giant and suggestively wobbling absinthe jelly.

The garden was particularly impressive and contained edible rocks, soil, plants and insects. As part of his research for using insects as food, Blumenthal consulted a Victorian book, ‘Why Not Eat Insects?’ by Vincent Holt. He followed this up with a visit to a famous British entomologist, Dr George McGavin.

McGavin talked to Blumenthal about edible insects and offered him a variety of insect-based foods, including fried crickets and meal worms. Blumenthal then used fried locusts and meal worms, filled with a tomato paste, as part of his edible garden. Even the apprehensive guests tried the cooked insects and seemed surprised that they were not disgusting.

You can watch the episode on the Channel 4 website and read a post-recording interview with Dr George McGavin.

If you are interested in getting a copy of ‘Why Not Eat Insects’ you can find it on Amazon.

As we have cats, it’s not unusual to have an occasional mouse taken into the house, resulting in chewed books and carpet. When part of the living room carpet looked like it had been eaten, we first blamed the mice. After I took a closer look at some carpet damage I realised that it was being caused by moths rather than mice.

Carpet damage caused by moth larvae

The house is currently in disarray as we clean behind the furniture, relentlessly vacuuming and washing the carpet. The adults moths have (we hope!) all been killed but I forgot to take a photo to check the identity, although I am fairly certain that the moths are Tinea pellionella, the case-bearing clothes moth.

I did manage to get a photo of the actual cause of the damage:

The culprit: a caterpillar of Tinea pellionella; the case was around 1cm long.

The larvae are the life stage which eat fabric and they move around in a portable case which reminds me of caddisflies. We will need to keep looking for adults to prevent the laying of more eggs but hopefully we have killed or removed most of the larvae.

I recently came across Beetles in the Bush, an excellent entomology blog written by Ted MacRae. I particularly liked the use of taxonomic post categories to organise families into their respective orders and will start using it in my blog because it’s such a good idea.

Earlier this week I finished organising my insect records from last year in Excel. I was thinking about putting them into Access because it’s much better suited for such data and I may start building an Access database over the weekend. Another thought occurred to me, which was that there must be some freely available programs, perhaps some which can make use of Google Maps/Earth and Flickr. Do you know of any?

Finally, a little bit of eye candy:

Red and Black Shield Bug - This pentatomid caught my eye amongst unidentified material collected in Ecuador. © The Natural History Museum

I recently ordered some Royal Entomological Society insect handbooks and they all arrived today. They were discounted due to damp damage which seems superficial; one of the covers had some marks which I removed with a damp cloth and some of the staple-bound books have rusty staples that I plan to replace. The books also have a slight damp smell that I hope will disappear after some airing.

Most of the discounted books are for Diptera but they also had some on aphids and sawflies. The handbook list can be found on the RES publications page.

The Local reports that a new species of longhorn beetle (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) has been confirmed in Sweden. The new species, Leiopus linnei, is very similar to L. nebulosus but DNA barcoding combined with the examination of male genetalia and female spermathecae support its establishment as a separate species. The original article was published in Zootaxa.