Hardier Than I

 Today I wanted to stay inside where it was not grotesquely humid, but I did check up on yesterday's caterpillars when I went out to get the mail. I saw two of them in a perfect pose for a picture and went right inside to get my camera, so of course one of them had moved by the time I got back less than a minute later. But as it was broad daylight you can probably see the caterpillars better than in the pictures from yesterday:

There were two of them sharing this leaf, one on each side. If you look at the top of the picture you can see the other one crawling away.

This is my favorite view of caterpillars, seeing their prolegs with their weird little feet gripping onto a stem.

I think these walnut caterpillars are what I once read about as semi-gregarious. Or maybe they are just gregarious; this pile up seems more than semi-gregarious. My bad explanation for gregarious is that they live together, and semi-gregarious means they sort of live together. If you want a better explanation go look it up, because I am a lazy blogger.

The bees certainly don't object to our current stifling weather. 3 species on one autumn joy sedum plant. There were a lot of bees today, but they are pretty active when the weather is warm, so rather than try to take pictures of them I just watched them for a few minutes before the weather drove me inside (being less robust than insects, apparently. 

Because the weather was so gross we didn't take our walk in the woods until night, and though I did contemplate bringing my camera, I decided against it because we didn't have a huge amount of time. Then I wished I had it, because I saw a enough bugs that it would have been worth having with me. There was one, however, that I made the effort to take pictures of with my phone, illuminated by flashlights. We found a nice spiderweb right across a path, and having seen it before walking through it, we walked around the tree it was attached to in order to avoid breaking any of its anchor strands. I then glanced back at it to see the spider from the other side, and in the few seconds we were walking around the tree a bug had flown right into the web. The spider got excited, and so did I, because it was a female pelcinid wasp. Before I could get my phone out for a picture she had escaped the web, but she flew around us, landing on the ground, and then my leg, and then my husband's legs, where I finally got a few shots:

It's probably a good thing my husband reads my blog, and therefore knew that that long abdomen is not a stinger. Otherwise I am not sure he would have been so calm with this thing climbing up his pantleg.

There has been a jumping spider between the screen and the glass of the storm door on the back porch for about a week. I assume it is finding things to eat there, although it seems like a strange place to hang out–and no, I don't think it is trapped in there, it definitely has room to move around and get out of there. Anyway, today I took its picture for Arachnid Appreciation:

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It looks a bit like a bold jumping spider, but the colors are different, so I don't know if there is color variation in that species, or if this is a different species. It is pretty small, which you can judge for yourself using the window screen for scale.