In the mid of March my wife and I went on a nice long weekend to Valencia, which turned out to be a very nice city.
From the point of view of nature there it leaves something to wish for though. Spread throughout the city center there are small parks with mainly Mandarin trees and Geraniums beds. the main park is an old river that encircles the city in an arc on the north side. In it are larger groups of Mandarin trees that attract the carpenter bee Xylocopa.
The Geraniums attracted larger numbers of Geranium bronze (Cacyreus marshalli), a simple but still beautiful and remarkable butterfly that I have seen before in France but didn’t manage to catch it on photo. Almost all of them were quit heavily damaged.
The species is native to South Africa and is an invasive species that is gradually spreading over Europe.
The main park contains the architectural highlight of the science museum and centre for modern art. This part of the park has the best nature as the grass fields are lined with small zones with rougher terrain where wild flowers grow. In one bed flew two long-horned bees but those didn’t end up on a photo. A little further a small colony of Oxythyrea funesta beetles was foraging on flowers.
The park contains a number of bridges and underneath one of them numerous wasp nests were build with mud. At least I think they are wasp nests.
A small bee turned out to be the common Sweat bee Lasioglossum sextrigatum.
As this was a citytrip and not necessarily an insect trip I like to travel light and therefore only equip my emergency macro setup which consists of Canon 70-200L IS I and Canon 500D close up lens dioptre. The photo quality with this combination is good, but a true macro lens like the 180L gives sharper results.