Today's insect watching was productive yet again. It's been a funny day weather-wise with a reasonable bright and pleasant start which later turned into heavy dreary rain. I took the opportunity and my coffee into the garden and sat next to the productive mallow clump, seemingly so loved by hoverfly species.  Having these broken bones has forced me to concentrate on my garden a little more than usual and I am pleased that this has been so productive. Yet another new species presented it's self today. Eristalis horticolis. Eristalis sp. are Droneflies and horticolis can be sperated from the others by the "shadow" markes on the wings. Other than that this  species could be confused with the false Dronefly Myathropa florea. Another large but quite dull Dronefly is Eristalis Tenax, probably the most common Dronefly. I took this nice photo of a female.

You may remember that I blogged about Crab Spiders the other day? Well this morning looking into the undergrowth I saw an interesting occurrence played out in front of me.I noticed a small hover which seemed to have a grey abdomen but a quick look revealed a small hover being predated by a crab spider. Not sure of either the hover species nor the spider.
                          Here it is on the end of my thumb, you can see how tiny this little spider is and also note the stripy legs which I am sure I think is going to mark this out as different species.