People are queueing up to live in Peckham as it has become so damn trendy. House prices have rocketed and everyday there is a letter through my door from some unscrupulous estate agent urging me to sell my house as ‘you live in a highly desirable location and we have a long waiting-list of people wanting to live in your street’. Tough, I ain’t going nowhere!

Ectemnius cephalotes out hunting and in the entrance to her tunnel

The digger wasp Ectemnius cephalotes is also house-hunting. Her requirements for the perfect nesting place is an old log, tree stump or timber stack. She is even happy to share with other females. There is a good choice of possible apartments in Warwick Gardens as there are nine large logs used as seating at the top end of the park. These double up as housing estates for various species of insect. Earwigs, woodlice, centipedes, solitary bees and wasps, beetles and spiders all find living here a ‘desirable location’. For the past couple of days our wasp has been scouring two particular logs, checking every nook and cranny for a suitable place to lay her eggs. Although willing to renovate an old nest, these digger wasps are super confident at DIY and will dig holes in the wood with their large jaws to create cavernous tunnels with separate cells for storing prey items.

Ectemnius cephalotes catching a hoverfly Syrphus ribesii, and pulling it into her tunnel

Once the wasp has excavated her tunnel and constructed her cells she needs to stock up on food for her larvae to feed on. Ours favours large hoverflies, in particular Syrphus ribesii, which look very similar to her. She will catch them in flight and with supreme dexterity pull them into her tunnel. I was surprised at how quickly this happens and just managed to photograph it! They will be stored in the cells. When her cells are full she will seal up the entrance to the tunnel and lay her eggs. Each cell will have one egg and the larva will have up to 12 flies to feed on. The adult wasps emerge in early summer.