Sugar/honey spray

Lord Vetinari

Beginning to run out of flowers in the garden to attract insects so I resorted to my Winter trick of spraying some sugar/honey solution onto some camelia leaves.

Brian V.

jpc

Very resourceful, Brian. Great shots, as always.

Lord Vetinari

Thanks JPC
Brian V.

Slowhand

Please explain

Lord Vetinari wrote:

Beginning to run out of flowers in the garden to attract insects so I resorted to my Winter trick of spraying some sugar/honey solution onto some camelia leaves.

Brian,

please explain this trick. What is the mixture of components? Since insect life is dormant and about to wake up here in South Africa it might help as well at this time of the year.

Thanks

chrisunderwoodimages

#4 is quite amazing. What kind of bee/fly is that one?

Lord Vetinari

Slowhand wrote:

Brian,

please explain this trick. What is the mixture of components? Since insect life is dormant and about to wake up here in South Africa it might help as well at this time of the year.

Thanks

slowhand - just a heaped teaspoon of sugar, about the same of pouring honey put into a glass ramakin dish with about 50ml of water and microwaved for 20 seconds to dissolve it. I then spray it whilst hot using a hand sprayer top on fine mist with the plastic pick up tube dipping into the solution. Wash the sprayer well wen finished

Brian V.

Lord Vetinari

chrisunderwoodimages wrote:

#4 is quite amazing. What kind of bee/fly is that one?

Thanks - it's a hoverfly- the largest one we get in the UK upto 20mm body length - Volucella zonaria. We get about 5 diffferent species of Volucella hoverflies all pretty big. The shot itself is natural light with fill flash all the others are full flash.
Brian V.