INVERTEBRATE ALERT
This blog provides an informal forum for terrestrial invertebrate watchers to post recent sightings of interesting observations in the southern Vancouver Island region. Please send your sightings by email to Jeremy Tatum (tatumjb352@gmail.com). Be sure to include your name, phone number, the species name (common or scientific) of the invertebrate you saw, location, date, and number of individuals. If you have a photograph you are willing to share, please send it along. Click on the title above for an index of past sightings.The index is updated most days.

2024 January 2

2024 January 2

[Apologies to all for not having actually posted this until January 13!   Jeremy Tatum]

    Jeremy Tatum writes:   We had an unusually warm December in 2023, and I have just heard of two late dragonflies and a late bee in that month.

First is a sighting by Ian Cruickshank of two adult Variegated Meadowhawks. They were found while Ian was doing the Sooke Christmas Bird Count in Metchosin in the Rocky Point area on December 27.  Dr Rob Cannings says it is the first December adult Odonata record he knows of in BC, and certainly Invertebrate Alert has no December Odonata records since the site started in 2010.

 

Variegated Meadowhawk Sympetrum corruptum  (Odo.: Libellulidae)
Ian Cruickshank.

 

One day later, on December 28, Claudia Copley found a queen Yellow-faced Bee Bombus vosnesenskii on a sidewalk in James Bay. She moved her to a nearby flowering heather so that she (the bee!) could get some nectar.

Yellow-faced Bee Bombus vosnesinskii (Hym.: Apidae)
Claudia Copley