The Sun in My Eyes

In spite of my own theory about the sun, I still persist in expecting it to be warm out when the sun is shining. To be fair, though, that may have something to do with the fact that last Sunday it was over 80º. It is simply unexpected to walk outside on a sunny day only a week later and discover that the temperature is only in the 50's. However, this is New England, and that's how our weather works.

As glorious as the sunshine was this afternoon, the bugs were not impressed by the chilly weather, so I didn't see very many of them. I didn't have a lot of time to look, but it was obvious that there was not a lot to see today regardless.

Of the 220-something pictures I took, over 100 of them were of the Backyard Bug of the Day. I was determined that it would be Backyard Bug of the Day, and it was moving, so I required a lot of shots to get what I wanted.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This is not a caterpillar. My guess is that it is a sawfly larva, but I wasn't able to find an identification for it. However, I only know of two things that look like this, caterpillars and sawfly larva, and this is not a caterpillar. If there is another kind of insect that has larva that look like this, I have not come across it in my admittedly haphazard researches.

 I have posted a slew of pictures of this, so you can fully appreciate various things about it. Like the colors. I can't really tell if it's dark blue and green, or black and light blue. It's one of those things that looks kind of different depending on how the light is hitting it.

 Look at that gorgeous, blue sky!

 One of the reasons I took so many pictures is that I was trying to get a good look at how many prolegs it has... (The lighter color definitely looks green here).

 Definitely more than five pairs of prolegs, so, not a caterpillar.

It's a little weird for me that even though I find caterpillars to be pretty creepy in general, the creep factor automatically increases when I find out it is a sawfly larva. I know caterpillars are larvae, but they have a different name, and I just am repulsed by the word larva for some reason.

We're done with buds for the year. Now is the time for seeds:

Random Bugs:

 Stink bug adolescent?

 This one, too?

 I debated about posting this. I think you can see what's happening here. I decided to post it, though, because it shows a tiny glimpse of the underside of the Saddleback caterpillar, and why this and others like it are called slug-like caterpillars. So if you ignore the Backyard Bug Behavior on display here, and just focus on the caterpillar, it's interesting.

 I know it's really hard to get a sense of scale in pictures taken with a macro lens, but this is a really tiny bee/wasp (I don't know. I think it's a wasp. But I am so programmed to think those stripes mean bee...). In spite of the fact that it was absolutely motionless when I first found it, I didn't get a good picture of it. But it was adorable, and you can at least get a sense of how small it is when you compare it to the goldenrod flowers. At least, if you know how small goldenrod flowers are.

 Spotted Cucumber Beetle again.

 I have posted a number of pictures of the Spotted Cucumber Beetle lately, and there is something I am trying to do. Whenever I have taken pictures of a SCB, at some point the beetle has gotten annoyed with me and flown away. As with most bugs that had a cover over their wings, there is a moment when they are preparing to fly when they lift the cover, and spread their wings. This lasts for less than a second. I have been trying to get a picture of the SCB doing this, and every time I mis-time it. Here it is just about to spread its wings...

 ... Aaaaaand you can see it in the upper right hand corner of the picture. This is the best shot I have been able to get so far. Usually I end up with just a picture of the leaf or flower that the SCB was sitting on. What's really aggravating is that several times when this has happened, the SCB has landed on another leaf/flower nearby, so I get another shot at it, and I miss every time! I even KNOW sort of when it's going to happen, and I still keep missing it! This doesn't just happen with SCB's by the way. I have played out this same scenario with many, many bugs.

 I think this is a wasp...

I am not sure if it's just the lighting, but it looks like its thorax is blue.

I have only one spider for you today, but I have several pictures of it, because they show something interesting about it. Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Here we have an absolutely adorable jumping spider with eyes that look like emeralds. It is hiding under a leaf.

 But when we look at its eyes in the sun, they look a different color. I got pictures showing its eyes looking green, brown, kind of a magenta color, and even one where it looks like each eye is two colors. In this picture one eye looks green, and the other looks magenta. (I am just talking about the pair in the middle).

 Here's a zoomed-in version. The rings you see in the eyes are a reflection of my ring flash.

In this one again one looks green, and the other magenta, but they also look brown at the bottoms (which is the top in this picture of an upside-down spider).

Zoomed in.

Green and brown.

 Here they just look brown. I assume this all has to do with how the light hits them, not that the eyes are changing in some way, but I don't know that much about spider eyes, except that they reportedly don't see very well. Like caterpillars they mostly see just light and dark. Funny for something with 8 eyes to not see very well.