The Bugs in the Backyard: Bug Gazing

I had a headache this morning so I spent some time just staring out a skylight at a tree. There were a lot of insects zooming around the tree. I couldn't tell what they were, they were too far away, but from the way they moved I would guess either bees or flies. I wondered what it was they were after up in that tree; it is not blooming, there's no nectar or pollen up there this time of year. It's the kind of question that I can't investigate myself; sometimes I will see something through a window and go outside to see what's going on, but I can't fly up to the top of a tree to find out what is up there that is attracting bees, or flies, or whatever they were. It's not even a climbable tree, as all of the branches are high up. A few bumblebees passed by the skylight, much closer, almost landing on it. A few wasps did land on it. A dragonfly, a huge one, cruised past, and a part of me wished I could point out to it that it had just gone right by a whole bunch of insects that were around the top of the tree, but then, why would I tell the predator where to find the prey? I am not on anyone's side in the workings of nature. What I did figure out in all of this was that there had to be a lot of bugs active in the backyard today. Maybe there were, but I think the majority of them were up in the tops of the trees. Still, I found quite a few down at ground level with me.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Beetle. Sitting on a rock in the rock garden. It was so cooperative I thought it was dead, but later it was walking around on the rock.

The most popular flowers in the backyard (practically the only flowers, now that most of the goldenrod has finished blooming) are the asters:

I tried to get a picture showing how many sweat bees were on this patch of flowers, but they all immediately flew away. However, there are still a lot of insects here...

Mostly ants, but one bee and a hover fly.

Elsewhere in the backyard, on another patch of asters:

The sweat bees were more cooperative.

And there were a lot of them.

Some kind of hairstreak butterfly. I couldn't figure out what kind it is. It's pretty beat up.

And of course, with all of those insects to eat, there are assassin bugs to eat them.

Tree cricket

I have never seen a woolly bear with that extra patch of brown by the head. This one is covered in parasites. It looks quite sickly.

Another sickly looking caterpillar.

Ichneumon wasp

This species of cricket has been absent from the blog, because I have not been able to get a shot of one, but they have been hanging out in the rock garden with all the other crickets.

I wish this picture had come out better. I think these are two different species of tree cricket, but it is possible that they are male and female of the same species. Some of them are very sexually dimorphic, I think.

A while back I posted a picture of this cocoon, and have forgotten to check on it since. Today I finally remembered where it was, and had a look, and was surprised to see this... stuff on the outside. I thought it was some kind of fungus, but when I looked at the pictures I remembered a situation from a couple of years ago. I had seen a white marked tussock moth caterpillar on the trunk of a tree, and it sat there for a couple of days, and then one day where it had been was a cocoon that looked like this. Then some time later I checked on it and saw that a moth had emerged; it was a female, and the female white marked tussock moth doesn't have wings. She emerges from her cocoon and just waits there for a mate to come by. After mating she lays her eggs on the cocoon that she has emerged from. The eggs overwinter and hatch in the spring, although in that case they disappeared at some point late in the winter (probably eaten by something). So, I am guessing that a female white marked tussock moth emerged from this cocoon, waited for a mate, and then laid her eggs there. It will be interesting to see if they last until spring this time.

I haven't been seeing moths around lately, but today I found one on the side of the house.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but this was a really large caterpillar.

Recently I have occasionally seen velvet ants in the rock garden, but I have failed to get pictures. Today I got a couple of not-so-great shots, but this might be the best I get. Velvet ants are not actually ants at all, but wasps. The females don't have wings, and have burrows in the ground where they lay their eggs and feed their young other insects. They reportedly have an incredibly painful sting (only the females).

So not cooperative.

Tachinid fly, I think.

There were a lot of spiders again today for Arachnid Appreciation:
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I am a little confused by what's going on here. That looks like the front end of an ant, but not the back end. Can this jumping spider actually be holding onto two prey insects at once?

I don't think it rained last night (or this morning), but it was apparently really dewy; the grass in the backyard was wet all day (it was very humid) and the spider webs were full of droplets: