Country diary: Thousands of honey drops on a single branch | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: In this garden we’ve had woolly aphids, rose aphids, whitefly and blackfly, now we have Californian maple aphids, who have a story of their ownAn accidental touch of a branch brings a handful of little sticky dots. Looking at the branch, the surprise is that all the lower ones are covered with a shifting pointillism of dots moving together. Under a hand lens they become autonomous animals – aphids.There are thousands of them, moving independently as individua