AES Insect Show 2014

One of the big insect events on my calendar has always been the Amateur Entomologists Society (AES) October show at Kempton Park racecourse. Because I've been at uni for the past 3 years, unfortunately I've not actually been able to go for ages- but this year, now I've graduated (argh!), I've not been up in Birmingham this weekend, and was able to go! Annoyingly, the weather was pretty horrendous, which made getting there and back a bit tricky, although the show itself is thankfully indoors. We managed to just about avoid the rain!

The AES show happens once every year, and basically it's an entomologist's heaven. Both floors of the building are packed out with stalls, selling a range of live and pinned insects (and spiders, plenty of tarantulas), books, art, shells and scientific equipment like nets, collecting jars and the like. It's pretty fantastic, and I've not come across anything else to quite the same scale or quite the same focused interest on insects.

The favourites to sell I think perhaps goes to the tarantulas (there are a lot of spider stands), but there are also tons of snails, millipedes, stick insects, praying mantids... and a couple of other rarer things, like katydids, grasshoppers, scorpions and hermit crabs. There were some pretty impressive boxes of snails, that kept trying to escape out the sides!

As a member of the Phasmid Study Group (PSG), I always make a bit of a beeline towards their stand at this show. Especially since I haven't been able to get to their meetings quite as regularly recently (again, due to being in Birmingham for university), it was quite nice to check out how the stand looked, and who was hanging around. Nice to see some of the old familiar faces.

 

One of the most popular things to sell at the AES meeting is pinned out insects- beetles and especially butterflies make up the bulk of these. There are some lovely blue morpho butterflies, atlas and other exotics, as well as native peacocks and the common brown species; wall, meadow and speckled wood. There was one stall that was selling pinned bullet and fire ants, which sold out of the larger soldiers very quickly after we got there and had a bit of a wander round.

I'm not such a fan of the dead specimens, but there are always loads of live ones to keep; there were quite a few very nice millipedes that really caught my eye, but alas, I haven't really got the space for any more than the one tank I already have (pink-legged millipedes). I rather fancy some nice orange ones one day though...

It was a pretty great day, and even managed to not spend a fortune on insects. And we didn't get soaked either! 

Spiders are cool

Spiders are cool. Like, really really cool. There's this massive stigma that they're absolutely terrifying, but, I've never really understood why. There's nothing more gross about a spider than there is a grasshopper, or a beetle, or even a butterfly- just because they're a different shape and like to come and chill in the corners of your bedroom in the winter, apparently that makes them incredibly scary.

The most impressive thing I think about spiders, are their webs. When I got lost on Godlingston Heath with the boyfriend a couple of weeks ago (no doubt I'll write about that eventually, there's lots to tell), we blundered across so many spiders, it was like something out of Aragog's lair, or Shelob's minions or something equally fantasy-bookish. We were a bit busy trying to work out which way through the forest of gorse bushes towards Agglestone Rock was least prickly, so we neglected to take pictures of the (hundreds) of spiders we came across (and their webs), but we found something even better once we got to Agglestone.

 Boyfriend for scale

This absolute beast of a web completely covered just one gorse bush next to Agglestone- strangely, every other gorse bush around was normal, with only a few webs here and there. It was this one specific bush, that didn't seem different or special from the rest, that was utterly covered. To the touch, it wasn't sticky, just very firm, with layers and layers of web.
Thankfully touching it didn't reward something like this (which I do admit, would have been a little bit frightening). It was amazing what such tiny creatures had managed to construct though, covering the whole bush so well!

I've seen webs cover gorse before, but not to quite the same amazing extent, and there's always been a few other webs around on nearby bushes, so this was quite a surprise! Especially when, poking the gorse itself, the webs were actually fairly good protection from the spines- something we had found out hurt all too well only half an hour before, when trying to get to Agglestone in the first place.
Now, with a little bit of googling and some good luck, I've found that these webs weren't actually woven by spiders, but something called gorse spider mite. Technically not spiders, they live in colonies and spin webs that act as shelters. This was a really massive colony! It's a biological pest control method that's used in a few countries where gorse is a weed, as they can cause massive damage to the host plants. This one looked fairly happy though, despite being absolutely swamped. Hopefully both will survive the winter season!