This is the penultimate blog about the creatures I’ve been seeing feeding on Drought-tolerant Common fleabane, aiding their survival during this summer of record-breaking heatwaves and drought. Today’s post features both spiders and wasps, starting with the spiders.

This first little cutie is a Flower crab spider, Misumena vatia, one of several of these sneaky creatures I found, not actually feeding on the fleabane but lurking around the edges of the flowers, ready to pounce on anything unsuspecting and tasty looking that was unfortunate enough to perch too close.

Nursery web spider (Pisaura mirabilis), quite a small specimen so perhaps one of this year’s brood.

Xysticus lanio is another crab spider, one that’s actually quite difficult to identify so I’m not 100% sure of this one.

These last two are Ichneumon wasps, not identifiable from these images but possibly from the subfamily Pimplinae. The one in the second photo is munching on a very tiny creature. There were also lots of common wasp species but they rarely stopped still so I didn’t manage any photos of them on flowers.