Quantifying My Pain

Two funny (sort of) pieces of information appeared today. One was a chart someone shared having to do with the relative painfulness of insect stings. It seems some entomologist came up with the system of classifying insect stings, as far as I can tell because he is a scientist, and they like to classify things. Anyway, it was very convenient timing, as I was stung by a bee yesterday, so I looked it up on the chart ("small bees" was a category) and it said that such a sting hurts for 2 minutes. Well, mine hurt longer than that, but it didn't hurt much. At the other end of the scale were larger insects whose sting supposedly hurts for 300 minutes. Definitely bugs to avoid being stung by.

The other funny (sort of) thing was an article about how to clean up all of the gypsy moth frass that is all over everything these days. The article said that when it gets wet, the frass is slimy. Ew. Not something I had noticed (it's not all over our porches or front walk, thank goodness), but I guess it's a problem for some people.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Moth. Maybe here is where I should mention that this was not a spectacular bug day in the backyard, although this is a perfectly nice moth.

Oh, another thing that was mentioned in the article about the grossness of frass was that the GMC scourge is almost over. Why? They are going to pupate soon...

 ... or as is the case in my backyard, today. Well, so far I have only found one pupa, but I think I interrupted the process for a couple of others. I prefer the pupae, because they sit still to be squished.

 Some kind of Hemiptera nymph

 Insect eggs

 I saw this, and thought it was interesting–could it be that this is the adult and nymph stage of the same hopper? I thought that nymph was of a buffalo tree hopper, but there is definitely a resemblance here...

I blinked and this happened. Yeah, this looks more like the buffalo tree hopper, ignore what I said above.

 I think this butterfly is laying an egg on this tree.

 I didn't get a good look at her, even though she flew around my head three times (I love the sound of butterfly wings flapping), but from what I can see in these pictures my best identification is possibly a red-spotted purple.

Beetle

Arachnid Appreciation:
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I am really not sure how this kind of web is supposed to work.