Bee Nice

There are over 20,000 species of bees in the world. I don't know how many species there are in Connecticut, but I saw an amazing number of bees in my backyard today. I didn't get many pictures of them, and none of them were good, but it was wonderful to just stand around and see how many bees were buzzing around. This year some of the wildflowers in my backyard are more abundant than they usually are, specifically dandelions, cinquefoil, and bluets, and so there is a lot of food for pollinators at the moment, and all of these little flowers were attracting bees (not to mention the crabapple tree, which has hardly any flowers left, but it still attracting a few bees). Well, not all of them, buy you know what I mean. What was really interesting is just that so many bees were skimming along the ground, over the grass or the leaf litter. The strangest thing I saw, though, was this:

 I see lots of insect swarms, but the peculiar thing about this one is that it is sweat bees. Sweat bees are mostly solitary, and though bees certainly do swarm, I didn't know that solitary bees do. This went on for quite some time. I got too close a couple of times, and they swarmed around me, which I was not keen about, having been stung by sweat bees before for transgressions I was unaware of.

Sorry, I got no other decent pictures of bees today, in spite of having seen probably hundreds of bees.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Stinkbug

I knew yesterday that when I made the six-spotted tiger beetle Backyard Bug of the Day with a mediocre picture that I was making a mistake. I KNEW that I would get a better picture another day, probably the next day (today), and that I should just wait until I had a better picture, rather than choosing it just because it was the first one I spotted this year. Well, as I like to tell my husband, I am always right. Today I found an exceptionally rare specimen: a COOPERATIVE six-spotted tiger beetle:

 It let me get so close! And it just sat there while I took its picture, instead of scooting around or flying away! In fact, I took a lot of pictures and then walked away myself, and it was still there.

As for yesterday's other Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Today I found a male velvet ant, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is actually a wasp, and while the females don't fly, the males do. They are therefore even MORE difficult to photograph.

 I think this is a soldier beetle.

 Fly

 I found this sap beetle on the leaf of a bush a few feet away from the tree where there were so many sap beetles last week. Or whenever that was. Time has no meaning for me anymore.

 Stilt bug

Ants