Possessive

R and I did some more quite heavy gardening this morning, working on a rather tragic old greengage tree in the secret garden, which was blown apart in last month's storms and has been leaning on other structures or lying around on the grass in chunks ever since. At one point we were using two chainsaws - R the big petrol-driven one, and me my little battery-powered Stihl pruner - which felt a bit too close to the story of the Three Bears not to be slightly ridiculous. Anyway, we got all of the obviously dangerous limbs down, and most of the smaller branches cut up and moved to the wood pile at the bottom of the garden. 

After coffee and biscuits (well-deserved), we went to Basfords at Blackminster and bought a battery-powered hedge trimmer, because our old petrol one is now almost impossible to start. I should probably gloss over the hot pork and stuffing baps we also bought from one of the cafés on the way back to the car, but I won't: they were delicious. After his doorstep sandwich R felt compelled to go out for a long walk, and I felt almost equally compelled to go for a bit of a lie-down, but I resisted the temptation and pottered around the garden instead, looking for invertebrates.

The most uplifting find of the day was my first bumblebee of the year, a huge Bombus terrestris queen, newly out of hibernation and still pretty torpid. I would probably have posted her if she hadn't chosen to rest on a scabby, half-dead leaf that makes the image quite difficult to interpret. Instead I've gone with the most interesting find of the day, which is this grumpy-looking Flower Spider, Misumena vatia. The two 7-spot Ladybirds have overwintered inside this euphorbia shoot, which at times has acted like a kind of vase, containing so much rainwater they looked as though they must surely have drowned, so I've been watching them since it warmed up at the beginning of the week in the hope they might start to show signs of life. The one on the right, which was the further of the two from the centre of the shoot, has now begun to move around, albeit quite slowly, but the one to the left, which was deeper in the 'vase', hasn't moved at all so far. It was only when I went to check on them today that I realised there was a small leggy something else inside the shoot with them, and on investigation it turned out to be the Flower Spider, cuddled up to the deeper beetle with several legs curled over its wing cases. As I watched, the spider emerged sideways, to the point at which it could spread its forelegs possessively over both ladybirds. I probably imagined hearing it say, "MINE. Go and catch your own."

In truth, I'm not at all sure a small crab spider would be able to tackle a large ladybird. Most spiders won't, partly because ladybirds advertise themselves as being unappetising, and partly because they're very adept at pulling all the soft biteable bits of themselves in under their carapace when they feel threatened. That said, I did once watch a large Garden Spider eat an overturned 7-spot Ladybird, slurping out the good stuff as if she was eating soup, so it can be done. But by something as little as this...? I have my doubts. Just after I took this the spider returned to cuddling the left-hand ladybird, leaving the less moribund of the pair free to move away if it chose to. I fear it may already be too late to worry about the fate of its companion.