THIS IS THE FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2015 POST

 NOTE: This is the blog for Friday, June 26th. Because of technical difficulties, I didn't get it published in time for the date on the post to be correct.

Technical difficulties have delayed me, so I am really late. Which is something of a theme around this blog today, because I was also running late when I went out to do my bug walk, and so I wasn't able to be as thorough as I usually am.

Fortunately, I did find some beautiful bugs today.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This is a banded hairstreak butterfly. If you have an absolutely exceptional memory, and have been reading this blog regularly for months, you may remember that several weeks ago there was a weird caterpillar that was Backyard Bug of the Day that I thought might be a banded hairstreak caterpillar. Think about it - this could be that caterpillar, transformed and flying around my backyard.

I am now going to bombard you with a ton of pictures of this butterfly, because it actually let me take a ton of pictures.

 Not that I am saying it was completely placid about it all.

 This is the closest close-up I could get to the wings, but that's pretty close for a butterfly!

Guess where I first saw today's Backyard Bug of the Day? So, Who's On the Milkweed Today?

On milkweed!

It wasn't alone.

I feel bad. I said that when I finally got a good picture of this bug it could be Backyard Bug of the Day, and I finally did, but I made the hairstreak butterfly BBotD. It is actually harder to get a good picture of a butterfly, those pictures are better than these, and I think I can still do better with this one. Next time, I swear...

Random Bugs:

 Don't let the picture deceive you - this is a tiny, tiny looper. About 1/4 inch long.

 How many moths do you see? (Hint: there are two in the picture).

Here's one of them. The other flew away before I could take its close-up.

 I can't tell if this is a dragonfly or a damselfly...

 I think this one is slightly closer to adulthood than the one from yesterday.

 I think today I took pictures of more species of butterflies in one day than I ever have outside of a butterfly house at a zoo.

Not that they were all good pictures... Here's the great spangled fritillary. Only saw this one today. Ho Hum.

I will now proceed to inundate you with a whole lot of fairly bad pictures of two cabbage white butterflies:

On lavender

 Nice to get a look at the dorsal side - the pictures I posted of a cabbage white last week were only of the ventral view.

 These two were doing a lot of that flutter around each other in circles thing that butterflies sometimes do. And I think that arched body might be a signal of wanting a mate. The book I used to identify the hairstreak, the National Audubon Society Pocket Guide to Familiar Butterflies of North America, says that there are two ways that male butterflies search for a mate. The banded hairstreak uses the perch method, where the male perches on a plant or flower and waits for a good mate to come by, occasionally flying around a bit to investigate other flowers, random other bugs, and perhaps humans standing nearby. The other method involves just flying around until you find a mate. It is interesting because the hairstreak sat and posed for me on a couple of different plants. These two cabbage whites, however (and I don't know the difference between male and female in cabbage whites, if they are sexually dimorphic), were flying around and around together, occasionally pausing on a lavender flower, presumably to feed.

 Not really cooperative...

So, between these, the fritillary, the hairstreak, and the skipper that was also on the milkweed, that is four species of butterfly photographed today.

There were enough moths on the front porch when I got home tonight to have made an impressive Porch Light Lepidoptera Lollapalooza, but I didn't take my camera out. There wasn't anything especially striking, and most of them were moving - I don't even know if I could have gotten a picture of anything. There had to be at least 20 species of moths, though.

I have spent all day trying to figure out what would be the best way to keep the chrysalis in the back of the mailbox from getting smooshed. I haven't come up with anything yet...

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Sweet Surprises

I had a couple of pleasant surprises today in the backyard. Well, one of them was in the front yard. In the mailbox, to be exact. And it wasn't the postal carrier who put it there.

 Remember yesterday I posted a picture of a caterpillar way in the back of the mailbox? Well, sometime between then and this afternoon it turned into a chrysalis. That brown thing in the middle of the picture is the chrysalis. The fuzzy thing to the left of it is the leftover skin from its final moult just before becoming a chrysalis. I couldn't tell what kind of caterpillar it was from what I was able to see of it yesterday, so I don't know what it will become, but I did read somewhere that butterfly caterpillars make a chrysalis, and moth caterpillars make a cocoon (with a chrysalis inside). I read this on the internet, so I don't know if it's true, but if it is, this will be a butterfly. So now I will spend the next couple of weeks worrying that the mail is going to squish it, and hoping that if it manages to become whatever it is going to become, that it is I and not the postal carrier who gets to see it fly away.

 Next surprise - one of the eggs on the picnic umbrella has hatched! I am pretty sure this is a baby stinkbug. It looks like a lion mask. In the bottom of the photo you can see which egg it hatched from - it's white, and you can see that it is open. It looks like a few more are ready to go, too. It's a bit surprising that they don't all go at once - I would think they were all laid at once. On the other hand, I don't know that for sure, so I'll see what happens.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This is the nymph of some kind of hopper. I don't know which kind, and haven't been able to find out yet. It's a pretty astounding bug, the kind of bug you are surprised to find when you first start studying the bugs in your backyard, thinking up until that point that they are pretty ordinary. I posted a picture of this the other day, but this one is better, and today it's BBotD.

I hope I am not completely boring you with my milkweed bug pictures. I am trying to restrain myself, and not post the same bugs over and over, but sometimes I just get a picture I really like, and can't help it. I will try to focus on anything new I find. I will note, though, that for the last couple of days I haven't seen any large milkweed bugs or small milkweed bugs. I wonder where they've gone all of a sudden. Today it was mostly the usual suspects for Who's On the Milkweed Today?

 Except this one. Not that I have not seen this kind of bug in the backyard before. If I ever get a good picture of it it will be BBotD.

 Speaking of not very good pictures...

 No idea what's going on here...

 How many plume moths can you see?

 How about now?

Random Bugs:

 There are plume moths everywhere. In fact, there are just moths in general everywhere, fluttering around my as I do my bug walk. They seldom land where I can take their pictures, though.

 Tiny katydid

I like that it is posed on a daisy, a common flower that perhaps gives you a sense of scale.

I did get one shot of a moth in the wild...

Right now there is a bug on the window screen making funny noises, like it's saying, "Pssst!" and trying to get my attention...

 Caterpillars are mostly muscles, and this looks like a pretty impressive display of ab strength (not that they have 'abs', so to speak), except that what you can't see is that it is supported by a silk thread attached to the vine above.

 Hemiptera are categorized as such based on their mouth parts, which have a proboscis, a kind of tube, that they use for sucking. It's not based on what they like to suck from, either the juices of plants, or the innards of other insects. There are also a lot of Hemiptera that look pretty much alike, and I can't tell most of them apart. It's often not until I see one with a hapless insect that it has caught that I can tell that it is insectivorious. I have seen this one around quite a bit, and for some reason assumed it was a plant sucker. I guess I was wrong.

 These are so adorable. I have never seen so many together before (with a bonus other Hemiptera, too).

 The one on the lower right has just excreted some honeydew.

 Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Jumping spider on milkweed

 This gorgeous spider is not a jumping spider, but it did fling itself off this tree trunk onto my hand. It cause a very minor freak-out. Both spider and photographer emerged unscathed.