On doing our garden walk this morning we came across hundreds of these:
They covered our gooseberry bush and raspberry canes, I recognized them as shield bugs (or as we call them here stink bugs for obvious reasons) but never have we seen them in these numbers. We spent the next hour or so physically removing them all from the plants and gave up counting after we reached 300! The strange thing is we do a garden walk every morning and night as well as working in it for most of the day at present and we had seen no signs of eggs or larvae on any of the plants so where they came from baffles us.
We did have an almighty thunderstorm and downpour last night so maybe they had lost their umbrellas and needed a shelter for the night!
We actually get a wide variety of shield bugs here and some of their colours are stunning these ones as far as we know are known by these names: the Black and Red striped shield bug, the Italian Striped Bug and the Minstrel Bug but after removing them to us they are definitely stink bugs!