Unreal bee/wasp maybe at least 2 inch long ??

[Stew2000]

You're so wise Nick
How about an old apple orchard and some woodland :P


What I don't understand is why am I only seeing them around the house now. I don't think I've ever seen a Hornet around here.

[Cowgirl]

I can understand re the alarm. When I saw my first BBC it was flying around & I thought it a huge wasp/hornet, calmed down, got a photo & id'd so realised it was harmless. I'd never even heard of them but guess what, I'd just built a pond.

On that subject, this weekend I saw a couple of dragonflies come into the garden & start swooping around my ponds, they were quite big (3 inches?), & had patchy blue colouration (difficult to see as I was talking to my neighbour at the time & couldn't chase it 'round the garden, they think I'm mad enough as it is ) at the end of the abdomen. Since I'm not fooling myself that I have a rare creature, what's type of common dragonfly could it be (bearing in mind I'm in the North) & are the blue ones male? Is this hatching time for them or something?

True re the crane flies, compared to other years, have hardly seen any.

[I Love Nature]

Originally Posted by djackal

Hi, last night we saw two huge bee like insects fly into our onservatory. They are extremely difficult to describe and i originally assumed they were hornets due to their unnaturall size. However looking on the internet this morning it is obvious they aren't.

They were at lest 2-3 inch in length and fairly fat and cigar shaped and had an extremely low and loud hum. They were dark in colour with a striped abdomen but not as yellow as a wasp, and were fairly hairy.

I would be most interested to know what they might have been, any ideas.

I live in Sussex and maybe somebody else might have seen them ????

This is kind of away from the point but I live in Buckinghamshire and I have a small pond that is about 2 years old. It's a frog pond and this Summer I've seen some bee/wasp/hornet things flying around the oxygenating plants. They've gone now I think it got too cold for them to be flying around the pond so I can't really remember them that clearly. They were slightly fluffy but not very (A bit like a honey bee) but they had markings more like a wasp. The think that struck nme was that as well as having a stinger they also had some small spikes on them. The spikes were really small though I had to lean in closely to see them. I would say they were about an inch long. I also saw a different type of bee with spikes on but that is irrelevent.