Don’t be fooled by the idyllic beauty of a Dorset heathland. Among the swaying grass stems, myriad misdeeds are taking place.
Words by DOMINIC COUZENS Images by GAIL ASHTON
t was a perfect late-summer day on one of Dorset’s heathlands. The sun was out, the heather shimmered purple to the horizon, grasshoppers chirped flirtatiously and, while the bees performed their humming chorus, turbocharged butterflies raced along the sandy paths.
It wasn’t only the bees that were buzzing. Gail Ashton, insect enthusiast extraordinaire and my guide for the morning, was revved up too at the prospect of seeing and photographing some of Britain’s rarest invertebrates. It seems that a Purbeck mason wasp stirs strong emotions.
The morning was gorgeous as we wandered serendipitously along the tracks. The traffic on the insect highway – the comings and goings of bee commuters, flies fussing at blooms, and even a redstart shivering its tail in the sapping warmth; all this abundance conspired to give the whole enterprise a sweet dollop of wholesomeness.
And then Gail pointed out a bee-wolf passing. “This is one of my favourite insects,” she declared, pointing at what appeared at first to be a ‘normal’ wasp. “It’s got a remarkable lifestyle.” This, I soon understood, was entomological jargon for ‘it does something unpleasant’.
And from then on, for the next hour and a half, any wholesomeness was truly banished from our perfect setting, as the mad, crazy lives of some of our homespun British invertebrates came into focus. A cloud came over the cloudless sky, but it was replaced by wonder.
G ail then pointed out something else to me. “That bee-wolf is carrying a honeybee,” she told me. “That’s what it does – the parasitoid lifestyle in action.”
What at first looked like an overweight wasp turned out to be an overladen one, skimming low across a miniature sandy cliff and over the heather horizon. It seemed to be an embrace, a pair copulating in midair, the wasp upright and the honeybee upside down, head-to-head, thorax-to-thorax, abdomen-to-abdomen. But the black head of the bee-wolf, with its distinctive white markings, could have been a symbolic burglar’s mask, for what we were witnessing was a cold-blooded kidnapping.
“It will have stung the bee to paralyse it,” explained Gail, with a certain entomologist’s relish. “It’s carrying it to its burrow.”
A second bee-wolf flew past, similarly la
