Recording Bugs

Bugs (Hemiptera) make up the fifth largest order of insects in the UK, with 2,000 described species currently recognised. They are abundant in all terrestrial and freshwater habitats, and include some of the most familiar insects, such as shieldbugs and aphids, as well as many more obscure species, such as plant bugs, leafhoppers, lace bugs and psyllids. Classification wise, Hemiptera is divided up into three suborbers:

Heteroptera

Shieldbugs and allies, plant bugs, seed bugs, ground bugs, lace bugs, water bugs and allies.

Auchenorrhyncha

Leafhoppers, froghoppers, planthoppers, treehoppers and lacehoppers.

Sternorrhyncha

Aphids, psyllids, scale insects and allies.

Whilst there are many species of Hemiptera, identification is often surprisingly straightforward, especially for some of the larger and more familiar species. Finding, identifying and recording these species requires no more equipment than a mobile phone. With a little extra equipment – such as a net, pots and a hand lens – many hundreds more species can be found, identified and recorded. This practice – finding, identifying and recording bugs – is an immensely satisfying passion for many people. It’s also essential baseline work for conservation; providing data on species occurrence, habitat, phenology and interactions. To encourage more people to get into recording bugs, we’ve compiled this webpage and stocked it full of useful resources to support your learning. We hope you find it valuable.

Finding Bugs

The most important tool for finding bugs… is already built into your face. It’s your eyes! When you’re starting out, it’s easy to gloss over this fact and be wooed into spending money on fancy equipment immediately. Equipment is certainly useful, but before doing so, we highly encourage you to learn to take the time to slowly and mindfully look around you whilst walking in nature. If you scan over every leaf and flower, you will quite quickly find you see some bugs.

This now acknowledged, it does of course really help to have some equipment with you if you want to find bugs. This is not least because finding things by eye in the vegetation is slow. There are many species which you will be very unlikely to see just by eye.

In the first instance, you will benefit from having equipment to collect and view bugs up close. This is often necessary to identify the species.

Hand Lens: Provides magnification in the field, allowing small bugs and important identification features on larger bugs to be examined more closely.

Collecting Tubes: Allow bugs to be safely contained for closer examination, identification or photography.

Pooter: Allows small bugs to be quickly and safely collected from vegetation, beating trays, nets and other surfaces without handling them directly. (N.B. Not always needed – many entomologists go without one).

A smartphone or camera with high magnification ‘macro’ capabilities is extremely useful for photographing bugs. The in-built smartphone zoom capabilities can also be improved by supplementing your phone camera with a basic ‘clip-on’ macro lens – these can be purchased for little cost online.

In addition to equipment for viewing bugs, you will also benefit from a range of equipment for collecting bugs – nets, trays, sieves and the like. The four basic methods for surveying for bugs are explained below.

Sweeping

The best technique to find bugs living amongst ground-level vegetation, such as grass and flowers, is to use a sweep net. Sweeping works great for finding herbivorous species and predatory species alike. Families like Miridae, Cicadellidae, Aphrophoridae, Pentatomidae and Nabidae are all sampled well by sweeping. Sweep nets are built to be sturdy, with a rigid wooden or metal handle and frame, and a thick cotton bag that is resistant to tearing. To sweep for bugs, the best approach is to move the net in a figure-of-eight motion ahead of you whilst walking through an area of vegetation. For a net model to buy, we recommend the Beginner’s Sweep Net or Complete Sweeping Net from Watkins and Doncaster.

Beating

A totally different community of bugs lives in trees to that which lives on grasses and herbaceous plants. Some species in families such as Aradidae and Psyllidae are almost exclusively found in trees, and never in ground-level vegetation. To find these species, the best method is to hold a large flat tray beneath leafy branches and then firmly knock the branches with a stick a few times. We call this ‘beating’. Specialist beating trays can be bought, however a basic white tray, such as this model from NHBS, works great too. You can also beat tree branches into a net. For a beating stick, many entomologists just use the handle of a net or a solid stick.

Sieving

Many species of bug live very close to the ground, in leaf litter and the bottom 5cm or so of vegetation, and so are very unlikely to be collected by sweep net. These species are instead best sampled by collecting samples of leaf litter and sieving them into a white tray. A generic garden sieve works great for this. Sieving works particularly well for many of the species in the family Rhyparochromidae, such as species of Drymus, Megalonotus and Scolopostethus. Sieving large clumps of moss during the winter is also a productive way of finding overwintering Hemiptera.

Identifying Bugs

Before you start identifying bugs, it’s essential to learn what the different parts of a bug’s body are called. The graphic below covers all the key terms.

More information on morphological terminology in bugs can be found on the following webpage: https://www.britishbugs.org.uk/bug_bits.html

General resources

These two websites should be your first ports of call for identifying Hemiptera in the UK. In 80% of cases, reference to British Bugs alone should be fine to identify your specimen.

  • British Bugs: https://www.britishbugs.org.uk/ – Easily the best resource for identifying Hemiptera, this website is the culmination of decades’ of work by Tristan Bantock and Joe Botting, two of the UK’s leading Hemiptera specialists. The website includes up-to-date checklists, species profiles for the vast majority of Heteroptera and Auchenorrhyncha (including key identification characters, photos and notes on confusion species), and guidance on recording bugs. Only a few Heteroptera and Auchenorrhyncha species are not covered, and in most cases these represent rarities which are unlikely to be encountered by beginners. British Bugs also includes information on
  • Mike’s Insect Keys: https://sites.google.com/view/mikes-insect-keys/mikes-insect-keys/keys-for-the-identification-of-british-hemiptera-true-bugs – This website has some excellent keys for identifying UK bugs (as well as keys for many other orders too) compiled by entomologst Mike Hackston. There is a key for identifying Hemiptera to major groups, and then keys for most of the main families. Note that not every family is covered by a key, and some keys are slightly out of date. Note also that the keys are designed to be used with dead specimens and a microscope. Using them to identify species from a standard field photograph is likely to be difficult if not impossible.

Heteroptera

For those few species of Heteroptera not covered by British Bugs, or for groups of species which are difficult to separate, there are a variety of other guidance documents which are helpful to refer to. These primarily exist in the form of unpublished literature, and rather than being accessible in one unified website online, documents have been passed around by Hemiptera enthusiasts informally over the web. I have compiled all the ones I have access to below:

Auchenorrhyncha

At the time of writing, the Auchenorrhyncha have been less well covered than the Heteroptera on British Bugs, so reference to specialist literature may be needed for the identification of species besides the most common and distinctive ones. The best resources are listed below:

  • Mike’s Insect Keys: https://sites.google.com/view/mikes-insect-keys/mikes-insect-keys/keys-for-the-identification-of-british-hemiptera-true-bugs/keys-for-the-identification-of-british-homoptera – Mike’s keys cover the Auchenorrhyncha in good detail, and are nearly always sufficient for the identification of species. There are however a very genera which aren’t covered with keys to species.
  • Royal Entomological Society ‘out-of-print’ handbooks: https://www.royensoc.co.uk/publications/out-of-print-handbooks/ – A series of keys were written for the British Auchenorrhyncha fauna written by Walter Le Quesne between 1960 and 1981. Whilst old, these handbooks provide exquisite detail on the morphology of leafhoppers and planthoppers unmatched by any of the modern sources, so are useful to refer to despite their age. The handbooks have been digitised and are available for free online. When using these keys do note that there have been many additions to the British fauna since their publication!
  • Biedermann and Niedringhaus (2009) ‘The Plant- And Leafhoppers of Germany: Identifiation key to all species’: https://www.nhbs.com/the-plant-and-leafhoppers-of-germany-book – This is the European ‘leafhopper bible‘. There are only a few species found in Britain which aren’t covered in this book. Each species is figured in detail alongside details of the genitalia, which is particularly valuable. The keys to family and genus are also good.
  • Wilson et al. (2015) ‘The Planthoppers and Leafhoppers of Britain and Ireland: Identification keys to all families and genera and all British and Irish species not recorded from Germany’: https://www.nhbs.com/the-planthoppers-and-leafhoppers-of-britain-and-ireland-book – This is a supplement to the above book which includes those few species recorded in Britain but not Germany, and has more useful keys to family and genus which exclude German species not found in Britain.

Sternorrhyncha

Sternorrhyncha has always been the least well studied suborder of the Hemiptera, and indeed for several sub-groups identification requires reference to literature which is (a) very old, (b) very inaccessible and/or (c) very specialist. Identification of aphids and scale insects also requires slide mounting specimens, a technique practised only by a few UK specialists. Psyllids are more easily identified, and there are good keys for these:

If you are feeling brave enough to try identifying aphids, the best first port of call is this website:

Getting help with identification

Facebook, for all its flaws, does host some excellent natural history groups where you can quickly get help with identification. For Hemiptera, there are four groups you may wish to join:

iNaturalist also has a very active community of people who identify Hemiptera observations. Uploading your photos there should lead to them receiving an identification within a few days.

Recording Bugs

If you’re new to biological recording, check out our guidance and training:

The collation and verification of Hemiptera records in the UK is co-ordinated by the Hemiptera recording schemes. These are volunteer-run organisations for which specialists volunteer their time to curate and verify incoming records for particular families of bugs. There are five recording schemes for Hemiptera in the UK:

  • Terrestrial Heteroptera (Shieldbugs & Allies) – run by Tristan Bantock
  • Terrestrial Heteroptera (Plant Bugs & Allies) – run by Jim Flanagan
  • Aquatic Heteroptera (Water Bugs & Allies) – run by Tony Cook
  • Auchenorrhyncha – run by Alan Stewart
  • Psylloidea – run by Joe Botting

You can find more information and guidance about recording bugs on the British Bugs website: https://britishbugs.org.uk/recording.html

All of the Hemiptera recording schemes favour submission of records via iRecord. You can submit your records through any form on the website or app.

Records submitted via iNaturalist will also feed into iRecord provided they meet various criteria.

Many recording scheme organisers also accept spreadsheets of records submitted directly to the recording scheme organiser via email.

The verification of Hemiptera records in the UK currently relies on a very small number of volunteers – many of whom are also busy full-time entomologists with other commitments. As such, records may take some time to be verified. So do not be put off if your records are not being verified – it’s almost certainly not a problem with your records, and more likely just the lack of verifier manpower available.