Looking for luv in the summertime

It has been a weekend of the smaller things in my neck of the woods. I was in the back garden, admiring the lesser stag beetles (pictured) that have emerged from our piles of wood. This time of year they march across the patio and around the rosemary. We used to see more of their cousins, the stag beetle, but these appear to have moved in recently.

Usual invertebrate fun transpired at the allotment, with snails and slugs being surprised at my endless attempts to hurl them elsewhere away from the plot. The local primary school must wonder why they seem to have a lot more gastropods ambling around after a weekend. Still, most find their way back to my plot and I pay them their rates of one in four seedlings to eat. Chris Packham would be proud.

Lastly, I was at a music festival in east London at a park. At sundown the local summer chafer (European june beetle) population decided to start looking for mates during the concert. This disturbed a lot of the younger folks, who thought they were bees. I used the Seek app to identify the bug and tell them not to harass it, just let it find its way. Perhaps it’s an age thing but it added to the fun of the event for us, although I did worry for the beetles, with people trying to squash them.

I think part of it is learning about us, and our place in the natural world. We and the bugs are all on the same thin apple peel, 90 kilometres wide and three kilometres deep, that we call habitable Earth, to paraphrase Helle Margrete Meltzer, former research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Often I think humans think they are somehow not part of the food chain, or that insects are separate. When in fact they are the key pollinators of food crops. We need them and they need us. But most of us dairy folks know that already.

• Suzanne Christiansen, editor, Dairy Industries International.
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