She wanted to know what they were, and should she be worried? Now, the living world in our soil can sometimes be a bit difficult to decipher, so we caught up with RHS principal entomologist, Dr Haley Jones, to find out more about the larvae in the soil, what they do, and what we should do about them.

[playful music] There is a big diversity of insects living in the soil, but probably one of the biggest groups that you will find crawling around in the soil is the beetles.

One of the big ones that people are often worried about is vine weevils.

They're a type of weevil, and their larvae do feed on plant roots.

So they have small legless larvae, so lots of beetles, the larvae have six legs near the front of the body.

And the little beetle larvae will have a brown head capsule, so you can kind of see their, like, mouth parts, in contrast to something like fly larvae, which don't have that kind of distinctive head.

Vine weevils, they have a head, but they don't have any legs.

Here to tell us more is Rachel Richards, the Bee Line Officer for Buglife.

Sound like an opportunity for you? Learn more and apply at longwoodgardens.org/fellows.

There's a few species that actually do really long distance migration.

So the silver Y moth, for example, it mostly overwinters in Northern Africa, and then when spring comes, it flies over the Mediterranean.

They fly up and they detect when they've reached a level in the air where the wind is going the direction they want to go and let themselves be carried those thousands of miles.

When the next generation emerges in the autumn, they actually fly all the way back to Northern Africa in one go, which is amazing.

Haley Jones to find out.

Everyone always asks, "What's the difference between a butterfly and a moth?" And the answer is not that simple.

There is no kind of one easy way to tell the difference.

[gentle music] It's really interesting, actually.

Everyone always asks, like, why are moths attracted to light? And we actually don't know for sure.

Like, lots of scientists have tried to study and have different theories about is it that they use the moon to navigate? That was a big one, but we actually haven't been able to definitively kind of prove why moths are attracted to light.

We're joined now by Dr Hayley Jones, who's on a mission to transform how we see one of their most misunderstood life stages, the caterpillar.

[Instrumental music playing] This year, Wild About Gardens, which is the RHS collaboration with the Wildlife Trusts, has picked the theme of moths.

Partly it's because they're really cool.

There's 2,500 different species.

They come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes and colors.

Is there anything we can do to deter slugs on those really soggy spring days that we do have quite a few of? Is there anything we can do to stop them munching quite so much on our lovely foliage? [laughs]

Yes.

Yes, there is lots of things that can be done.

It is sometimes gonna feel like a bit of an uphill struggle because in gardens where it's very damp and the soil's kind of very rich with lots of organic material, on certain soil types, slugs and snails are just always gonna thrive.

It is the ideal habitat for them.

But in general, you can channel what they need in a habitat and what they don't enjoy to help protect your plants.

So one of the things is having lots of natural predators.

So what other research do you do there in the lab?