Waspish

I have a massive headache right now that seems to confirm the weather forecast that it's going to be ugly for the next couple of days. I don't really believe weather forecasts anymore, but my sinuses say this one is correct. We'll see. For the moment, because I have a headache I'm going to just go right to the pictures.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Wasp.

Most of the insects I saw were from the order Hymenoptera: wasps, bees, and ants. Here are two of those, plus a fly from the order Diptera:

 Wasp and ant from one order, hover fly from the other on a milkweed plant.

 Wasp and ants, and you can barely see it because it's out of focus, but there's a fly toward the right.

 The milkweed were covered with insects, mostly wasps and ants, but underneath most of the leaves are aphids, so there were a lot of ladybeetles, too.

Meanwhile, on the goldenrod:

 Large milkweed bug.

I didn't tell it that it was on the wrong plant.

Wasps, however, were pretty much everywhere today. They were on the milkweed leaves, on the goldenrod, and on the Japanese knotweed:

 Usually there are a lot of species of bees and wasps, along with other insects, on the Japanese knotweeds, but today it was mostly just these wasps, and a LOT of them.

Okay, that was just a bunch of pictures of the same two wasps, but here's one of the many others that were there:

 

 Also, a mosquito. Fun fact: male mosquitoes feed only on plant nectar, not on blood.

 

I saw a lot of mosquitoes today. Many of them were trying to bite me, but a couple were feeding on flowers, or just sitting around:

 

 I spotted this moth, which is probably close to 2 inches long, hidden between two leaves on a tree. After I accidentally brushed a leaf against it, and then got close for this picture, I began to wonder if it was dead, because it didn't move. So I poked it and it flew away. I didn't get a good look at it, but I did see that underneath it is hiding much brighter colors.

 

 This blog isn't ever really an accurate account of what bugs I am seeing every day. For instance, I have been seeing a lot of hoverflies lately, but they haven't been willing to be photographed, so I can't show them. But this one finally cooperated with me.

 This is how I find a lot of caterpillars, fuzz or spikes poking from behind a leaf.

 Banded tussock moth caterpillar

I spotted this one crawling up a tree trunk. My patience exceeded my desire to bend either my knees or my back so I waited until it had crawled up to my eye level to take pictures of it. Funny that I don't think I have seen this species in my backyard before this year, but in the last couple of weeks I have seen them all over the yard.

 Another example of how to find a caterpillar.

 These fall webworms are everywhere at the moment.

The technique sometimes also works to find moths.

Some kind of geometer

 Assassin bug

 It seems like the wrong season to be finding eggshells, but I found this one today.

 Plant hopper

 Assassin bug with weevil prey

 Winter firefly. I'd be upset seeing this except that they are actually active more or less year round, so seeing one doesn't mean winter is close... even though it was even chillier today than yesterday.

Moth

I thought this monarch was going to eclose today; it definitely showed signs of it last night, and although it didn't look quite ready this morning, with a bit of green still visible near the top of the chrysalis, I at least expected it to come out in the afternoon. But this is a picture of it at around 6 PM, and the expansion joints haven't even popped. I kept checking it all evening, and it was still not out.

Arachnid Appreciation:

There's a small community of these common house spiders in a corner near the cellar hatchway, and they all have a bunch of daddy-long-legs in their webs.

This common house spider had a leaf in her web, and I always figure spiders much find that annoying, but this one was using the leaf as a hiding place.

She had a male visitor in her web.

Arrow shaped micrathena

Flower crab spider

Nursery web spider