Misidentity

Today I have to point out why you should not use this blog as a source for insect identification. I posted pictures the last couple of days of fungus beetles, and today as I was trying (and failing) to figure out what today's Backyard Bug of the Day is, I found out that at least one, and possibly all three of the insects I identified as fungus beetles (an identification that made sense, because they were feeding on fungus) are actually sap beetles (which also makes sense because the fungus was in sap, and also sap beetles apparently eat fungus). And these are things I actually looked up! Insect field guides can be confusing... Anyway, these may or may not actually be sap beetles:

 I could only find two species today. There were a lot of flies, but they were too high up to photograph.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is some kind of borer, but I couldn't find it in my books. There were some that looked similar, but not quite the same. You can see it had a lot of company on that dandelion.

 There weren't nearly as many bugs around today as there were yesterday, which surprised me because today was actually warm–we almost reached 80ºF. Those I did find were extremely uncooperative:

 

 It's a ground beetle. Usually these escape the camera by disappearing in the grass, but this one flew away.

There are still a lot of bugs around the flowering crabapple:

 We went for a moonlight hike in our woods tonight, and after we came inside I found this looper caterpillar on my sleeve. In this shot it is on a tissue I used to take it off my sleeve and carry it outside.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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