246 BR. J. ENT. NAT. HIST., 13: 2001 



unusual plant Daphne laureola. A full species list has been sent to our archivists and 

 supplied to Rod D'Ayala, the warden of this superb reserve. 



Nonsuch Park, Cheam, Surrey, 16 May 1998 



Leaders: David Lonsdale and Roger Hawkins. — The palace of Henry VIII at 

 Nonsuch is now nothing but a distant memory, but a small part of the original park 

 remains and is managed as a public amenity by the boroughs of Sutton and Epsom. 

 Two adjoining areas of former farmland extend the open space but have been the 

 subject of much controversial debate and several planning applications. The future 

 of one of them, Cherry Orchard Farm, remains unsettled, but the other, Warren 

 Farm, has been partly developed for housing, with its greater part handed over to the 

 Woodland Trust to be managed as a reserve for trees, wildlife and public access. 

 They will be trying to keep most of it as open fields. 



The meeting was attended by ten members of the BENHS and two visitors from 

 the Alton Natural History Society, who soon showed themselves to be just as 

 knowledgeable about insects as our own members. We also welcomed three adults 

 and one child from Nonsuch Watch, a society of local residents who record the 

 wildlife at Nonsuch and campaign to preserve these lands as a place of quiet 

 enjoyment. 



We went first to Cherry Orchard Farm, a former stock farm whose enriched soil 

 currently supports a flora of coarse grasses and tall herbs. The junior member of the 

 party was most interested in colourful but common insects such as the red-and-black 

 froghopper, Cercopis vulnerata Illiger, the twenty-four spot ladybird, Subcoccinella 

 24-punctata (L.), and a pentatomid shieldbug, Eurydema oleracea (L.), which was 

 present on horse-radish in both its cream-spotted and red-spotted forms, and these 

 were actually mating together. The entomologists took more interest in less common 

 insects such as the leaf-beetle Chrysolina oricalcia (Miiller) and the weevil Magdalis 

 armigera (Fourcroy) which was abundant on elms in the hedges alongside the fields, 

 both here and at Warren Farm. 



We stopped for lunch, most appropriately, at the Banqueting House, a Tudor relic 

 which survives only as a rectangular brick wall on which we sat and ate our 

 sandwiches. The ground inside the wall is raised and encloses several tall trees. The 

 attraction of this site is a colony of the scarce ant Lasius brunneus (Latreille), 

 discovered here by Peter Harvey in 1993. We found it nesting in two large oak trees 

 and, perhaps surprisingly, also in a cedar, where it was tending aphids living on some 

 overhanging ivy. The field meeting had been advertised as a hunt for both this ant 

 and a rare four-spotted ladybird, and a tiny four-spotted coccinellid beetle was 

 indeed beaten from the ivy overhanging the cedar. It was not, however, the species 

 we were searching for, but Nephus quadrimaculatus (Herbst), a formerly-rare species 

 that has recently become quite common on ivy. Mike Fox lingered at the Banqueting 

 House after lunch but, far from having a siesta, he continued to sieve the leaf litter 

 diligently in search of ants and was rewarded by finding two more uncommon 

 species, Leptothorax nylanderi (Forster) and Stenamma westwoodi Westwood. Both 

 were in the leaf litter beneath the oaks and the former was also found on the trunk of 

 the cedar. Some management of this site has been proposed, but felling the mature 

 oaks would destroy the colony of Lasius brunneus, while cutting the grass and 

 generally tidying up the site could easily eliminate the other two species. 



The former arable farmland of Warren Farm had developed into long grass with 

 many flowers and a massive invasion of the Canadian goldenrod, Solidago canadensis 

 L., which the Woodland Trust is attempting to control. Here Ian Menzies swept the 



