Bugs

You have to expect, when you're on a camping holiday, that there'll be a few bugs.

We discovered, within a few hours of arriving in our pitch that we're somehow host to a nest of wasps rather closer to the camp than we're completely comfortable with. We've managed to come up with a, possibly daft, way to deal with them. A little syrup into a bowl placed a little way from the table keeps the wasps (and indeed many of the other bugs) away from our food.

Less easy to deal with was the very large beetle who'd managed to wander into the tent and was clinging firmly to the side near the girl's pod. Thankfully our German neighbour seems to be a man of imagination, and a cup and a plate later the bug was scuttling off into the undergrowth – in the OTHER direction from the tent.

The European hornet on the beach was quite a trick, as it happens. I knew nothing about this bug until a kindly gentleman was pummelling it to death beneath his croc shoe. I decided to dig up the little beastie, in the hopes of being able to identify it. I'm not sure you can imagine my shock on finding that the creature was still alive, and actually attempting to claw it's way out of the sand. I'm very sorry to say that the squeals of 4 panicking females is quite hard to resist, and so I re-buried the little beastie. A quick google later and I found that far from being the indiscriminate stinging machines I'd been led to believe, these gentle giants are, in fact, quite shy, leading me to believe that this one had been lured to the beach by the smells of discarded ice-cream wrappers. There's a part of me that hoped it survived it's re-burial, and flew back to it's nest to live a long and happy life. There is, however, a huge part of me that doesn't believe that's possible.