You might remember a very colourful and joyful blog from July last year (Parent bug mother and babies) when I shared a sighting of a Parent bug (Elasmucha grisea) female with her huge brood of young buglets (or, more correctly, nymphs, but I quite like buglet!). Well, just as I was heading home from a recent wander around Cardiff’s Grangemoor Park, I was fossicking through the leaves of an Italian alder tree and spotted this scene.

Though her colouring is quite pale, this is also a Parent bug mother, only this time she’s huddling over and protecting her eggs. Whether or not she was still in the process of laying the eggs or whether these eggs were a few days old I don’t know, and I didn’t want to disturb her by looking more closely. I grabbed a couple of quick photos and left her to her mothering duties.