The Golden Rod is in full flower, and as always is attracting a lot of insects. I can’t say I like the plant so much, but the flowers are really attractive to a big diversity of flies, hoverflies, bees and wasps. In this case though the new species is a Nursery Web Spider making its web up in the flowers. The female of these spiders carries the eggs around with her until they are ready to hatch, when she creates a web for the young spiders to stay in until they are ready to disperse.

The other insect is a solitary wasp of some sort. there are a whole lot of species of mason wasps and ground living wasps with this basic colouration, and identification is not easy.