Cold and Dark

The temperature has dropped in the last couple of days, and the high today was in the low 60s, which is definitely chilly in comparison, but it's certainly not cold, so I found it strange that when I went out today I didn't find any insects at all. Not even wasps feeding on the grapes on the back porch tree. But when I got back from my second woods walk after it got dark, my husband spotted a caterpillar by the garden, so I went in and got my camera. Having my camera out, I figured I might as well look around a bit, and I found a surprising number of bugs just in the area around the garden and the back porch. 

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Weevil

 Here's the caterpillar my husband found:

 And here's a couple more I found on my brief, after-dark walk:

 

Tiny looper on goldenrod

Possibly the biggest looper I have ever seen, I think also on goldenrod (but obviously on the stem, not the flowers).

Sharpshooter, a larger species of leafhopper. These are usually very uncooperative and hard to photograph, but I think that this one was too cold to want to resist having its picture taken; the temperature was in the 50s by the time I took my camera out.

 

Some white flies:

These are so small that if you don't know what they are, you would not see them and think that you were looking at insects.

There were a lot of moths on the flowers, a couple of species, with multiple specimens of each:

 

I saw quite a few spiders, mostly tiny and/or lurking in hiding. Arachnid Appreciation:

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Nursery web spider

Flower crab spider

I found this beautiful little spider...

... in a tree. It was so small, and just high enough that I couldn't get close with my camera, so here's a zoom-in view.

Like I said, lurking...

Nursery web spider

Night In The Garden

The sound of chainsaws in the distance is ruining my joy in being outside during the day lately, but fortunately there are bugs to be found after dark. Not many at the moment, because we have suddenly entered into a phase of autumn temperatures, but when I went out after dark to pick the last of the peppers in the garden for dinner, I found something crawling in the grass:

Woolly bear caterpillar. It was crawling, but then when I tried to take its picture it curled up in a defensive ball.

Since I was out there with my camera I decided to look around to see if anything else was there...

We have marigolds in the vegetable garden, and ironically, they are there to ward off critters, but they were full of them tonight:

Well, they were full of earwigs.

 

 Actually, there were earwigs all over the place.

There weren't any sleepy bees on the flowers, but there were a couple of night-shift pollinators, like this moth...

... and this mosquito.

It is a male, as you can see from its feathery antennae. Therefore, not a blood-sucker, just a nectar-sucker.

A couple of days ago I took these pictures:

I tossed out some spoiled grapes last week, and it was a lousy toss, so instead of making it into the woods a large bunch of them got hung up on the back porch tree, where they have been hanging ever since. They are very attractive to wasps...

... but for some reason, even though there's a whole bunch of grapes there, they all have to crowd together on one grape.

This one paused to clean its face on a leaf after eating.

Arachnid Appreciation:

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Here is the one photo I took this afternoon, because I spotted this bee... and then noticed the spider. The spider blends in pretty well with these flowers, as its abdomen is similar in color to the center of the flowers. Obviously the bee thought so, too.

Mimic

 When you're thinking about planting a garden, make sure that you have flowers that will bloom in the fall. Not only will it extend the beauty of your garden, but it will provide food for pollinators up until the frost. Most of what blooms in my backyard are wildflowers, and I think there may be more flowers blooming now than there were in the spring or summer. And the pollinators are loving it. 

I didn't do a bug walk today, but when I was outside for a while I saw a bug that drove me to go in for my camera (I intended to do a bug walk later, but it was one of those days that don't turn out the way you intended).

Backyard Bug of the Day:

A fly that looks like a bee. This is a species of flower fly, and even knowing that at a few angles when I was taking pictures I thought it was a bee. But you can tell by the eyes, and by the fact that bees have two pairs of wings.

I took this picture a couple of days ago after the rain stopped:

I think this is a woolly bear caterpillar, but the stripe at one end, instead of just a solid black end is new to me. It was pretty small, and I would expect it to be bigger by this time of year. I don't know what those blister-like bumps are on its back.

Long Time, No See

 First, the good...

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is the first fritillary (possibly great spangled fritillary) that I have seen in at least two years. I know it's not a good picture, but for a butterfly that I haven't even seen in years this is good enough.

The other good thing: in a summer when butterflies have been scarce, I actually got pictures of two species today!

Pearl crescent. They have been hanging around this part of the backyard quite a bit in the last several days.

The bad thing? I took my camera out in the backyard this morning, and after only a few minutes (which included the two butterfly pictures above) I was forced to flee inside by mosquitoes. They were aggressive, and numerous, and day-biting. I didn't want to put on bug repellent at the time, so I just gave up. Later, when I went for my woods walk and brought my camera I did put on bug spray, on my arms, neck, and a bit on my face, while also wearing insect repellent pants, and the mosquitoes did their best to make it a horribly unpleasant walk. Any time I stopped for a moment I was swarmed. When I tried to take pictures they would take the opportunity to try to bite me. It is very hard to focus a camera when there is a mosquito on your nose. When I got back to my backyard and continued to look for bugs I eventually had to give up because there were so many mosquitoes, and after walking in the woods for an hour and a half the insect repellent had apparently sweated off my arms. It was brutal. We had a lot of rain this summer, and in particular a couple of big storms at the end of August and the beginning of September, and all that water has led to swarms of mosquitoes. The small pond has dried up again, but for a couple of weeks it had water in it, and that water was full of mosquito larvae. No doubt thousands of them made it to adulthood (but I hope a lot of them dried up with the pond). And there are probably little puddles all over the place, in crevices of rocks, holes in trees, that are breeding grounds for the nasty little bloodsuckers. I have never seen so many mosquitoes in my life. I am actually hoping for an early frost now, because I just don't think I can deal with another month of this. Thank heavens for every creature out there that eats mosquitoes or their larvae, bats, dragonflies, elephant mosquito larvae...

Okay, this is an adult mosquito, not a larva, but I am pretty sure it is an elephant mosquito, which means when it was a larva it ate lots of other mosquito larvae, and for that I am grateful.

Bee on goldenrod. There were a lot of bees on the goldenrod today, but between their lack of cooperation and the mosquito assault this is the only one I got a photo of.

Look who decided to be a little bit cooperative today:

Female pelecinid wasp

Today the deer trio did not run away when I came along. I happened to spot them because I saw a spider web and they were beyond it when I turned to see the spider. They are practically invisible when they are not moving:

I brightened up the picture so you can actually see them.

Today I saw a fair number of spiders, of multiple species, and a lot of webs, too (several of which I walked through with my face). So, here's to Arachnid Appreciation:

The orb weaver on the front window.

Orchard spiders:

This time of year, if you walk around at the right time of day you can see a lot of spiderwebs illuminated by the sun. They are beautiful, and as an added bonus, easy to avoid walking through.

White micranetha

Another white micrathena, on a tree stump instead of its web because I broke its web with my face and then it ended up dangling from my arm, so I put it on this stump.

This spider was so small that the only reason I even saw it scurrying along its web thread is because it was moving. And I had to look through the camera to confirm that it was a spider, because it was too small to tell with the naked eye.

More webs: