Tag: nature

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Squashed Fly Biscuits

Don’t worry dipterists, these delicious biscuits don’t actually have flies inside them! Also known as Garibaldi biscuits, the ‘flies’ are actually currants. Why not have a go at making them?

You will need:

  • Baking tray – lightly greased or with baking paper
  • Mixing bowl
  • Rolling pin
  • Wooden spoon
  • Teaspoon
  • Knife
  • Plate
  • A work surface sprinkled with flour
  • A wire rack to cool the biscuits
  • Oven pre-heated to 200oC (180oC if it’s a fan oven) / Gas mark 6
  • Oven gloves
  • A grown-up assistant

Ingredients:

  • 225g plain flour, plus a little extra for dusting
  • 100g currants
  • 75g lightly salted butter
  • 50g caster sugar
  • 5 tablespoons of milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon, mixed with 3 tablespoons of sugar
  • 3 drops of vanilla extract
  • Beaten egg or milk to glaze

How to make the biscuits:

1 Wash your hands. Make sure your assistant washes theirs too.

2 In the mixing bowl, rub the butter into the flour using your fingertips. Keep going until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs.

3 Add the sugar and milk.

4 Mix the ingredients together in a bowl until it forms a smooth dough.

4 Cover the bowl with a plate and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to cool.

5 While you are waiting, lightly grease the baking tray, or lay some baking paper on it, and lightly sprinkle flour on your work surface.

6 Pre-heat the oven to 200oC (180oC if it’s a fan oven) / Gas mark 6

7 Using the rolling pin, roll out the dough on the floured work surface until it is spread out into a 30cm square.

8 Cut the square of dough in half with a knife.

9 Scatter one half with the cinnamon & sugar mix and the currants. Save some of the cinnamon/sugar mix for the topping.

10 Put the other half on top, making a sandwich with the currants in the middle.

11 Roll the dough again until it’s about 5mm thick. You should see the currants showing through.

12 Carefully lift the dough onto the prepared baking tray. Ask your assistant to help you.

13 Trim the edges and use the knife to score the dough into 8cm x 4cm rectangles. Be careful not to cut right through.

14 Brush with egg or milk, then scatter the remaining cinnamon/sugar mix on top.

15 Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Ask your assistant to help, taking them out when they are golden.

16 Cool the biscuits on the wire rack and then break them into individual biscuits.

If you want to make the biscuits vegan, replace the butter with vegan block and the dairy milk with plant milk. Brush the biscuits with plant milk instead of egg wash.

We hope you enjoy eating and sharing your biscuits! If you liked this recipe, why not have a go at making our iced beetle biscuits?

This is the last post from Crunchy on the Outside because the HOPE for the future project has come to an end. We have really enjoyed sharing the amazing world of insects with you. The blog will stay online for the time being and you can check out all that’s happening at the Museum on our Main Website.

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Make a model wasp

At or recent Wonderful Wasps! event, we learned what a diverse group of insects wasps are and how important they are to the environment. We finished by making marvellous model wasps. Here’s a template for making one of your own at home. Some parts of this ‘make’ are a little trick but we think the end result is well worth it!

What you will need

  • A print-out of the template. Ideally print the body parts on yellow card but paper will work too. Print the wings onto white paper
  • Five black or brown pipe cleaners
  • A piece of string, thread or wool
  • Scissors
  • A stapler
wasp-templateDownload
wasp-wingsDownload

Making your wasp

1 Cut out the pieces.

2 Carefully make cuts in the card as shown by the dotted lines.

3 Arrange the thorax, abdomen and last segment pieces in a line. Staple a pipe cleaner to these pieces as shown in the pictures below.

4 Staple the wings onto the thorax.

5 Fold the last segment into a cone shape and secure with a staple.

6 Bend each abdominal section into a circle, slipping the slots together to secure it.

7 Bend the thorax into a circle, slipping the slots together to secure it.

8 Thread 3 pipe cleaners through the holes in the thorax to make 6 legs.

9 Bend the sides of the head together, slipping the slots together to secure it.

10 Staple the bottom edges of the head together

11 Staple the thorax end of the pipe cleaner onto the flap forming the top of the head. Push the end, attached to the tab into the slot.

12 Attach the eyes to the head by pushing the tabs into the slots.

13 Use the waist to connect thorax and abdomen by pushing the tabs into the slots.

14 Tie one end of a string to the pipe cleaner between the thorax and abdomen and the other end between the head and thorax.

Your wasp puppet is now ready!

We hope you enjoyed building your model wasp. When you have finished playing with it, you can use the pipe cleaners for another craft activity and recycle the rest of your model. If you enjoy craft, you might also like to try to try your hand at making an Origami Ladybird.

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Your questions answered: ‘Which plants will help butterfly larvae?’

Brian contacted us recently with this question. He is planning a nature garden and wants to attract pollinating insects. That means attracting, not just the adults, but providing food for the larvae too.


The best advice is to to include a range of plants in your garden and to avoid using pesticides. This will attract a range of different insects to your garden. While many adult insects are generalists, feeding on a range of flowers, their larvae are often adapted to a specific species. An example is the Small Tortoiseshell butterfly, Aglais urticae. While the adult butterflies feed on nectar from many different flowers, the caterpillars feed only on the common nettle. The problem is that many gardeners are happy to grow lots of pretty flowers but sometimes less keen to give space to ‘weeds’ like nettles.

Our friends at the Charity Butterfly Conservation have produced a great list of food plants, which you can find here: https://butterfly-conservation.org/sites/default/files/butterflyfoodplants.pdf

We hope that helps Brian and everyone else spending chilly winter days planning their garden. If you have made a garden to attract insects, we’d love to share photos in our Gallery.

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Darren Mann

In the latest of our series of interviews with people who work with insects, we talk with Darren Mann, who is Collections Manager at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford, and an expert in dung beetles.

How did you first become interested in insects?

I’ve always been interested, as long as I can remember.  I was one of those kids who had ice-cream tubs full of caterpillars, spiders and woodlice in jars, and tadpoles in buckets. I started the serious study of insects when I was ten. 

My junior school teacher Terry Denman pretty much changed my life. He was a vegetarian, as was I and we veggies were rare back then. More importantly, he had a real passion for natural history and that was apparent in our classroom, we had frogspawn and newts and even a fish tank full of Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches. Cockroaches were an unusual pet in those days, and when I left school he gave me three females and a male. I called him George, and they lived next to my bed – I think I cried with happiness when they had their first babies. 

I was not always the most well-behaved or attentive kid at school. Mr Denman noticed I liked natural history and got me to work by saying ‘you need to write a story, write it about the cockroaches’.  I used to sit by their tank and write about the cockroaches.  Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t found that avenue for me to put my energies into?!

What is your role at the Museum?

I have been very fortunate: the collections here at the museum are amazing! I spend about half my time working with the collections and doing research on beetles. About 20% of my job is teaching and outreach, giving lectures and talks, for students, visiting school kids and natural history groups. 10-15% is answering enquiries and giving advice, and pest identification “I found this bug in my garden what is it?” The remainder is administration and the paper work side of working with the collections. 

Dung beetles from the museum collections

What is the beetle project you are working on?

In 2016, I was approached by English Nature, the government agency for nature conservation. They were reviewing the conservation of British animals and plants so they could update the conservation status of different species.  If a species had been under threat of extinction, was that still correct today? Had the number of threatened species gone up or down?

The last review for beetles was done in 1992 and there were a lot of errors and it was out of date. One person had tried to do all beetles I one go and that’s an almost impossible task, there are over 4,000 different types in the UK! I was approached to do the Scarce and Threatened Review for dung beetles and chafers because that’s my favourite group.  I declined as I didn’t have time to commit to a lot of extra work. I suggested my mate – Steve Lane, he did the bulk of work and then we spent time chatting and providing data and information. We gathered data from across the UK though amateur naturalists, museum collections and books and articles.  Based on the number of records over the last 100 years, we calculated how the different species had changed and published our work. 

A review of the status of beetles

It was an eye opener for me as there are a few species I thought were still widespread or common, that had drastically declined. However, I didn’t realise they were in trouble because they in were in parts of the UK I rarely visit.  There’s the Cockchafer, everyone knows the May bug, and that’s doing ok. But there’s a second species – the chestnut cockchafer in Scotland, which is not doing so well. I’ve never seen it as I don’t go Cockchafer hunting Scotland. The only one’s being seen were from people light trapping for moths. We discovered more species were declining than were previously believed. Since you can’t be everywhere all the time you don’t notice some of these declines.

We wrote about all the endangered species, and over the last five years Ceri (my wife and dung beetle hunting partner) and myself have taken holidays in search of some our rarest dung beetles. So far we’ve found two species that were thought extinct in Britain, and a few that are critically endangered but hadn’t been seen for 15 years and one for nearly 90 years.

What is your favourite insect?

“A very pretty beetle” Onthophagus nuchicornis

It’s really difficult to choose just one, but I think my favourite is a dung beetle. We gave it the common name Dillwyn’s dung beetle (Onthophagus nuchicornis). As Lewis W. Dillwyn (1778-1855) was one of first people to catch it. It’s very pretty with a dark pattern contrasting against an almost cream background.

Ceri, Steve and myself have spent many years surveying across the UK for this beetle. Worryingly, its numbers have crashed more than any other UK dung beetle and it has gone extinct at over 90% of the sites where it used to live. In most cases we don’t know why this is, but this beetle is a good indicator of a broader decline in species.

Darren and his favourite Longhorn Cattle

If you enjoyed reading about Darren’s work as an entomologist, take a look at other posts about people who work with insects in our ‘People‘ section.

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A Festive Tale: The Mistletoe Marble Moth

In this post, we’re taking a festive look at an insect that rely on Mistletoe. Humans may enjoy kissing under it, but for the Mistletoe Marble Moth, Celypha woodiana, it’s food for their caterpillars.

Munching on mistletoe – don’t try this at home!

Larva of the Mistletoe Marble Moth, Celypha woodiana. Image: Patrick Clement CC BY 2.0

It would be a bad idea for us to try eating mistletoe because it’s poisonous to humans. For the Mistletoe Marble Moth, however, this is the food plant for their larvae. These overwinter snug inside mistletoe leaves. As the weather warms up the larvae become active and feed on them throughout the spring. In the picture above, you can see the trail the larva has left as it munched through the leaf.

In early summer, when they have grown large enough, the larvae pupate. The adult moths then emerge and fly in and around woodland and orchards containing fruit trees like apple.

Mistletoe Marble Moth Celypha woodiana . Image: OUMNH

The apple trees are important because they are a host for the mistletoe plant. Mistletoe can’t grow in it’s own. It relies on other trees. The berries are very sticky and when birds eat them they clean their beaks on by rubbing them on the bark of trees, the seeds get stick in tiny crevices and begin to grow out of the tree. The mistletoe plant grows into a ball on the brach of the host tree.

Mistletoe growing on a host tree

Apples are one of the trees mistletoe prefers. Sadly apple trees are becoming more scarce in Britrain because there are fewer orchards. This means there is also less mistletoe and that means that the Mistletoe Marble moth is becoming rarer. It is a priority species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan because scientists are worried that this species may become extinct in Britain.

Other insects on mistletoe

The Mistletoe Weevil, Ixapion variagatum Image U Schmidt CC BY-SA 2.0

This moth isn’t the only British insect that relies on mistletoe. The Mistletoe Weevil Ixapion variegatum feeds on the part of the stem behind buds and there are several bugs that feed on sap of the plant, and another that is a predator: so there can be a whole food chain on a sprig of mistletoe!

We won’t ask if you’re planning on kissing anyone under the mistletoe this year, but for those who like to bring it into the house, please remember that we also need to conserve it, and the many insects that rely on it, in the wild.

If you enjoyed reading about the Mistletoe Marble Moth, you may be interested in this article about the ways in which other insects survive the winter.

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Wonderful Wasps! FULLY BOOKED

Many people are wary of wasps, they like interrupting our picnics, they can look a bit fierce, and some have a sting in the tail, but it’s well worth getting to know this amazingly diverse group of insects. Our next Crunchy on the outside event for young people interested in nature, and insects in particular, is Wonderful Wasps! It’s at the Museum on Wednesday 28 December, 10.30-12.00pm.

We’ll be finding out about some amazing wasp species, looking at the Museum collections to see the fantastic range of different wasps in the UK, and making our own wasp models.

It’s free but booking is essential. To book a place please email hopelearning@oum.ox.ac.uk

We hope your New Year resolution will be to look after our wonderful wasps!

Take a look at our article on fig wasps here: Fabulous Fig Wasps.