My local - now disused - Victorian cemetery is like an old woodland. There are mature trees with woodpecker holes, tree stumps, dead wood, thick leaf litter. Dead wood is a habitat full of life even in winter. Slugs and snails, springtails, millipedes and centipedes, woodlice, mites, little beetles and their larvae, tiny spiders, and fly larvae: they might be a bit torpid, but still active. In the cemetery, I often come across flat-backed millipedes, Polydesmus on dead wood, often in pairs. They are relatively large and - true to their name -, have a flat, sculptured back. There are five similar species of this genus in the UK that can be only told apart by examining the male gonopods, an 8th pair of modified legs to transfer sperm, or the females' genitalia (which opens behind the second pair of legs), features that can only seen properly when dissected. Males have sturdier legs and appear to have a gap behind the 7th leg (where their gonopods are), where in females the gap appears behind the second pair. The most common species is P. angustus.
 A couple of weeks ago, I surprised this pair of embracing flat-backed millipedes under a piece of rotting stump, maybe mating or just checking each other out? In another photo I can see that the head of the millipede on top is holding onto the rear end of the other one.
And a few days ago I found a pair of smaller ones, one of them is walking at the top of the post.

On top of a log pile under a shelf in the garden lives a large female Tegenaria. She has a large funnel shaped sheet web with a deep retreat. Every time I water the plants nearby - something I've had to do a few times in the last few weeks due to the dry weather - she jumps out of her retreat to the front to the web, only to find that there is no prey, just some water dropplets, and then she rapidly hides again. Today, I got my camera on one hand and a watering can on the other and managed to get a few close ups of the spider, which dutifully posed for me for quite a long time after being prompted by the watering. I also photographed her funnel and when I looked closely into the photo I could clearly see two tiny spiders on it.
Many female spiders display maternal behaviour, the most basic version consists on wrapping their egg clutches in a silky cocoon which protects the eggs from predation and adverse environmental conditions and shelters the spiderlings during their first moult. Some spiders go further than that, for example wolf spiders carry their egg sacs and spiderlings on their abdomen for a while. Tegenaria - the usual bath spider - has a different kind of maternal behaviour: the females, usually agressive and predacious towards prey entering the web, in contrast 'accept' the spiderlings on their webs for about three weeks after hatching, often longer, until these disperse. The tolerance behaviour turns into cannibalism as the spiderlings grow, but by then most of her offspring would have dispersed. Mated females lay several egg clutches in the spring - the offspring of the previous autumn males.

Females in all reproductive states - even virgin females - tolerate newborn spiderlings on their sheets, but females which are at the reproductive state when they have spiderlings are the most tolerant of all. Females rapidly approach foreign spiderlings placed on their webs but after touching them with their first legs and palps leave them alone, while they often attack and eat crickets of the same weight. The female's behavioural changes towards older spiderlings have probably to do with chemical changes in the spiderlings cuticles. Even if it seems like a very simple form of maternal behaviour, the fact that the spiderlings are able to remain on their mothers web for a few weeks is likely to dramatically reduce their chances to fall prey to predators.

More information
Pourie, G., and Trabalon, M. (1999). Agonistic behaviour of female Tegenaria atrica in the presence of different aged spiderlings Physiological Entomology, 24 (2), 143-149 DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-3032.1999.00124.x

We made a couple of log piles in the garden last year. Today I dismantled one of them to check what was in it. This was a very 'untidy', and relatively dry log pile, with the logs having been covered on branches from pruning bushes around the garden and the location being under a large Philadelphus bush. The first finding was that a lovely crumbly pile of compost had accumulated around the logs. There was a lot of bug activity in the pile. The most abundant form of -visible- life were woodlice, especially the common rough woodlouse, Porcellio scaber, which made the compost move as they were so many, also some smooth woodlouse, Oniscus asellus and common striped woodlice Philoscia muscorum. I found three species of snails: many common garden snails, Helix aspersa (=Cornu aspersum) most of them hibernating; a yellow banded snail Cepaea (one of 5 specimens we released in the garden a couple of years ago), and several Glass Snails Oxychilus draparnaldi (photo above). Several yellow slugs Limax flavus crawled around. There were quite a few spiders, amongst then a very large Tegenaria and possibly an Amaurobius, which rapidly disappeared amongst the logs. I also found some Blunt-tailed Snake Millipede (Cylindroiulus punctatus), which coiled into a spiral when disturbed. I saw some new springtails, but I couldn't get a decent photo. As for insects, a Harlequin seemed to be hibernating on a log. By far the most shocking thing was a couple of enormous earthworms, Lumbricus terrestris, which I found while they abandoned the log pile - possibly feeling the disturbance - by creeping on the ground. One of them was so large that at first I thought it was a snake! Big fun examining this log pile, I am sure I forgot to mention some bugs. I didn't even go through the whole of it but it yielded quite a number of interesting finds.

Other than ladybirds, the occasional carabid or a few weevils, beetles do not figure very high on the list of common garden visitors. I was so pleasantly surprised when on Sunday, while tidying up the garden we came across a Lesser Stag Beetle (Dorcus parellelipipedus). These large, grey-black beetles, related to the Stag Beetle, are not uncommon in the UK, but sightings are rare north of the Humber according to the National Biodiversity Network Gateway. The adults and larvae feed on decaying wood - particularly ash, apple and beech. This is the second one I see in Hull. We live in a street lined with large trees and I collect dead fallen branches - including those from a large ash - from the verges and bring them to our garden for our log pile (we also used those for our bee posts). The log pile (see this for an interesting page on log piles) tends to be full of common critters like snails, woodlice and earthworms, nothing very exciting. Occasionally Digger Wasps nest in the decaying wood and I would like to think this beetle was actually born in the garden.

In 2003, quite a warm summer, an interesting wasp kept watch of the cloud of hoverflies (mainly Episyrphus balteatus) on the nearby flowering Hebe bush from my garden bench. It was there every day and I called it 'Benchy'. A browse in the Chinery guide - the 'Bible' for insects in the UK - showed it was a wasp of the family Sphecidae - a digger wasp. Digger wasps are hunters specialising on various insects, which they paralise and stock on nests to feed their larvae. They excavate their nests, often on the ground, and thats why they are called digger wasps. Wild About Britain provided the ID for the genus, Ectemnius, and even a few guesses for the species ID: E. cavifrons, E. cephalotes and E. sexcinctus, with the first two being the most common. The wasp has returned year after year and I have managed to assemble a collection of photos illustrating a few aspects of the natural history of this fascinating animal.The wasp is yellow and black, with a big head and very large eyes, which make a large area of the head - a very different feel from a common wasp. It is indeed a highly visual animal and it nervously scans around in search for its favourite prey. Oher species of the genus like to hunt other types of flies but Ectemnius cavifrons favours hoverflies.
I managed to shoot a hovering Ectemnius wasp, unfortunately a blue plastic car ended up being the background, doh!
For a few years 'the nest' seemed to be located far away from my garden as the wasp disappeared into the distance carrying its booty. But last summer I got lucky and I managed to locate a nest in a dry log in the pile of wood under the BBQ.