Pear-shaped little monsters and other aphids

• More than 500 aphid varieties thrive in this country. Many are specialists, infesting a wide range of food sources, including willow, cypress, beech, fruit trees, potato plants and flowering plants, such as willowherb, foxglove, hellebore and campion. They come in an array of colours—green, red, purple, brown and black—some with a mottled pattern and others with a cover of waxy wool

• Most detested in flower gardens is the rose aphid (Macrosiphum rosae), a pearshaped little monster, usually green, but sometimes red, that can frustrate the most ardent grower

• Broad beans in the vegetable patch are a magnet for the black-bean aphid (Aphis fabae), which also infests beet, artichokes and poppies. Naturalist Gilbert White recorded ‘great clouds’ of black aphids covering every plant in Selborne, Hampshire, in August 1774 and a further infestation in the hot summer of 1783, which ‘defaced and destroyed the beauties of my garden’

• Aphids were responsible for the Great French Wine Blight of the 19th century, which almost wiped out the industry and spread to Italian and German viniculture. The sucking, small greenish-yellow aphid Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, of the genus Phylloxera, brought inadvertently to France from the eastern US in 1858, caused leaf and stem galls and root nodules, rotting the vines. After 25 years of increasing decline, the European wine industry was saved by grafting its vine varieties on to US rootstock immune to aphid attack

• Scholars believe biblical manna may have been the white crust of dried honeydew