Bugs All Week Long

The rock garden is my view out the window as I sit at my computer, and right now it is a carpet of purple flowers with bumblebees bobbing from place to place. As I know from when I went out to get the mail earlier, there are myriad other bees, too, much smaller species that are too small to see well from where I sit. I have seen a lot of insect activity out my windows the last two days, balmy, sunny, glorious spring days. I have seen my first butterflies of the season, two species (but not, so far, any mourning cloaks, usually the first butterfly I see, and generally on a day in March that seems much too cold for butterflies).  Excuse me, one of them is back, gotta grab the camera... Oh, well, flew away before I got out there, typical... Where was I? Ah, yes. I... wait, another butterfly just flew by. Obviously, instead of being inside on my computer writing about seeing bugs, I should be outside with my camera watching and photographing bugs... More later...

 

Okay, it's later, much later...

 I did a long bug walk today, and was outside for more than an hour, but despite all of that time looking for bugs, and actually seeing a lot of bugs, only a very small number of the 105 pictures I took are of bugs. Seeing bugs and getting pictures of bugs are not the same things, especially now, when my knee problem (which will be surgically repaired in a couple of days, making this harder in the short term, but hopefully easier in the long term) and my inner ear problem make it hard to take pictures of bugs on or near the ground, which is where most of them are these days. It is kind of funny, actually, that I have seen several species of bugs out the window that I have not seen while I was actually outside. Anyway, I have done bug walks of varying lengths several times in the last week or so, but have not blogged about it (as you may have noticed), so this is going to be a blog of the bugs in my backyard in the last week–ish. Which is a break of the rules I made for the blog (the pictures have to be from the day of the post), but I think I am just going to change that rule now, and maybe this will be a weekly blog now. I don't know...

So, in the rock garden...

It is impossible for me to really give you an impression through pictures of what is going on in the rock garden the last couple of days. I ended up sitting on a rock bench in the middle of the rock garden for a while, just watching and listening to the bees, not trying to take pictures at all. I thought about the fact that up to a certain point in my life I probably would have been nervous sitting there with big bumblebees zooming around me, but now I know they are not going to hurt me. Most of the bees in the rock garden were really small and fast. I was happy to see them all, because up until a couple of days ago I had a garden full of flowers, but bees were scarce.

Big bumblebee

If you look carefully toward the middle of the picture near the top (where the brown leaf is) you can see another bee, out of focus and in a hurry.

But let's go back a bit, to almost a week ago on April 8, when I found only one bumblebee, but it was much more cooperative than the ones today (and I didn't blog about it because... well, reasons):

 This one is from yesterday. It rained in the morning, and in the afternoon the sun and a few bees came out:

 Ah, spring...

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is a sap beetle, mostly because it was going for sap on a tree, and my other guess would be fungus beetle. It is probably much smaller than you think from this picture, less than a quarter inch long.

I had to be very careful taking this picture, as this tree was only about a foot away from another tree with a poison ivy vine on it. Even in winter, the poison ivy vine without any leaves can give you a rash.

Also going for the sap on that tree, a winter firefly.

Last week this tree was covered with snow fleas, but today was much warmer and dryer, and that's not their kind of weather. It's mine, though.

There are bluets blooming on the driveway, and they attracted a couple of bees, too:

Small flowers get small bees.

Wasp on forsythia. Looks like there is a bug in the flower on the lower left, too.

This bee has obviously been at the flowers, because you can see the pollen packets on its legs (I don't remember the actual name for those; I call them pollen pants), but here it is drinking some sap on a black birch tree, which is basically sugar water (fun fact: maple trees are not the only trees whose sap can be used to make syrup. There are several others, including black birch).

A less-than-usually bashful bunny

Okay, let's look at the bugs from the past few days. I didn't get a picture of the first butterfly I saw, two days ago, a spring azure, but here's the second, from yesterday, a cabbage white:

Today I saw both species of butterflies several times (I have no idea if it was different individuals, or the same ones over and over). I did not get any other pictures.

First dandelion of spring!

Yesterday I brought my camera on my walk in the woods. There was a swarm of little insects hovering by one of the bridges, and it did not react at all to me standing there, as you can tell from the fact that you can see my boot in the picture:

Not too far away I saw a much bigger swarm in the woods–do you see the little points of light between the trees in the middle of the picture?:

Blackfly larvae on leaves in the rushing stream

Water strider on the stream, in a part where it is more placid.

This blob is a salamander egg mass in the small pond. There are only a few egg masses this year. I suspect that the fact that the pond dried up before the salamanders could hatch the last two years has had a bad effect on their population. I don't remember the species of salamander I figured these to be, but I do remember that I read that they spawn in the same place they were born, and one night every spring (evidently around the end of March/beginning of April) they all emerge from the ground (they are a subterranean species) and mate in the pond where they were hatched. Two years ago some of them hatched before the pond dried up; last year none of them did. So there may not be very many salamanders left to mate in that pond. I hope it will last long enough this year for the eggs to hatch and the young hatchlings to grow out of their aquatic phase (I don't know what they are called, but it's basically the salamander version of tadpoles).

On Monday I didn't intend to do a bug walk, because I had a couple of appointments in the afternoon, but I ended up with a little time, and saw a little spider, so I got my camera and had a look around for a few minutes.

But the spiders will come later. Here's the bugs from 4/11:

Okay, the bug from Monday, apparently I only found one insect, and two spiders. Anyway, I think this is a sawfly.

 From 4/9:

This clump of woolly aphids has been on this branch of a flowering crab apple tree for some time, but now they seem bigger and woollier.

2 winter bugs, a winter ant, and a winter firefly. It wasn't quite as warm a week ago as it was today.

Candy striped leaf hoppers on their usual tree. Interestingly, this was almost a week ago when it was quite a bit cooler than it has been the last few days. Today when I went looking on that tree there were none there; I think it is warm enough now that they have dispersed from their wintering spot.

Chipmunk

Another big (but not as big) swarm of gnats, along the same path along the same wall, but considerably farther down the wall. I had to walk through this swarm because the path is narrow there. I do not like walking through swarms of gnats.

Lady beetle

From 4/8:

Hoverfly

 A week's worth of spiders for Arachnid Appreciation:

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Tiny jumping spider on forsythia

Spider exuvia. If you look closely you can see where the body split for the spider to climb out of its old skin.

Jumping spiders are abundant lately.

 

This one has caught something.

 

This little charmer was enough to get me to go inside for my camera the other day.

Dramatic spider in the deep woods

Ephemerals

 People joke a lot about the ephemeral nature of spring. Depending on how cynical they are, spring lasts, a day, an hour, twenty minutes, blink-and-you-miss it. It definitely seems sometimes that after a long winter you have one really pleasant day and then all of a sudden it's summer, hot and humid. Although, around here spring arrives tentatively, a nice day followed by a week of chill, then a pleasant afternoon followed by a snowy day. But that's just the weather; if you look at the life emerging spring is a progression. And that includes spring ephemerals, flowering plants that bloom in the spring for a short time. I don't know if things like daffodils and crocus count, since they are not native plants, but this week (yesterday, in fact), one of my favorite spring signs of spring, a spring ephemeral, appeared in my yard:

Bluets

The first daffodil bloomed yesterday, too. I checked these flowers, as I have checked all of the flowers that have bloomed so far this spring, for bugs, but they have been woefully bereft of insects.

The freeze earlier this week killed my crocuses, but this wilted flower had a tiny insect inside it today, I was happy to find.

And finally, FINALLY, after the creeping myrtle in the rock garden has been in bloom for weeks, my vigilant search for bees has been rewarded!

Yesterday there was a small bee on the side of the house by the rock garden, that flew away when I tried to take its picture, but for a while now I have been waiting for, and expecting to find bumblebees in the rock garden. With so many flowers in bloom, the rock garden in early spring is usually buzzing with bumblebees. Today one finally arrived.

The forsythia also bloomed yesterday, and though I could not find any bugs on the bush yesterday, there were quite a few today:

When I spotted this and took this picture I thought this was a beetle, but as I look at it now I think it is a sawfly.

Several of the flowers had these little bugs in them.

Candy striped leaf hopper

There are more flowers in bloom than you might first notice, because to see most of them you would have to look up:

A few trees are in bloom, but wind-pollinated trees don't have showy flowers. In fact, for most of my life I don't think I realized that they had flowers. I thought that the colors on them in early spring were just leaves opening up. Now that I know so much more about nature (acknowledging that in the grand scheme of things I know practically nothing), it seems silly that I didn't realize it, but there you have it. I am silly, trees are very tall, many of them have flowers that are very small, and I did not take AP Bio in high school (nor did I take any plant biology classes in college. I took geology, and learned about septic systems). These are the kinds of flowers that are the cause of your misery if you have seasonal allergies in the spring. But I, an allergy sufferer, love them all the same, and it thrills me to see them waking up in the spring.

And the flowering crab apple is opening its leaves!

Hello leaves! I am so happy to see you!

I didn't intend to do a full bug walk today, but once I found a few bugs on the forsythia I could not resist. I went on a different path than I usually do, venturing a bit into the woods and back around through the field, and on one particular long, straight wide path, found something interesting. Backyard Bugs of the Day:

I came upon a huge swarm of some kind of insect along a wall by the path. I have never seen a swarm of insects this big in my yard. It stretched along the wall for about thirty feet (and I later found out there was another swarm, not as large, at the other end of the wall, about 100 feet away). Unlike the winter crane fly swarms, these insects did not land when I came close, they just shifted away a bit. They were so small, and flying so fast, that I could not tell what they were, but they seem to be some kind of gnats. I couldn't get close enough to really see them. At one point while I was watching them a gust of wind swept them away, but they must have liked the location because they swarmed back when the gust exhausted itself.

Zoomed-in look

More bugs:

There were little flies all along the front walk, but this one on the picnic table was easier to photograph.

Ant and snow flea

Candy striped leaf hopper on the tree where I usually find them on sunny winter (or spring!) days.

I thought this was a wasp when I first spotted it, but looking more closely through the camera I wonder if it might be an ant queen.

This is a tree where snow fleas are likely to be found when the weather suits them:

From the ground up to about eight feet they were all over the trunk on the sunny side of the tree.
 

Arachnid Appreciation:

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