Night Surprise

I found more bugs today after dark than during the afternoon. Some of them were bugs you'd expect to see by night, but some of them are definitely not. But then, I have long since realized that I still know almost nothing about bugs, and I should not be surprised when they don't act according to my expectations.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Weevil on autumn joy sedum. One of the night bugs I found, although I don't think that weevils are specifically nocturnal or diurnal. Rather a large one among the kinds of weevils I usually see in my backyard.

Other Bugs:

Assassin bugs on autumn joy sedum this afternoon.

There is some goldenrod growing among the autumn joy sedum, and it was a more popular flower today.

Cricket

What I saw the most tonight were mosquitoes feeding on goldenrod:

Male, as you can tell from the feathery antennae.

Female

What I expected to see after dark: moths pollinating goldenrod:

Earwigs:

Tree crickets:

You can also hear them. I can hear them right now from inside the house.

There's a male and a female on this plant.

 

What I did not expect to see after dark:

 A butterfly sitting on a leaf. I think this is a pearl crescent, and I had seen one in this area during the afternoon. But I have never seen one sitting on a plant in the dark.

Moth eggs on the deer netting over the blueberry bush

I think this is a crane fly.

I found an amazing variety of spiders for Arachnid Appreciation:

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The spider web on the living room window is pretty wrecked; about half of it is destroyed. I don't know what is all over it–it looks like pollen but this isn't the right season for that.

The rest of these spiders I saw at night, when I went out with my camera after dark:

Spider on the autumn joy sedum. I am not sure if this is a nursery web spider or something else. I think it's something else. It might be new to me, as I don't recognize the markings. I think it is a male, based on the club-like pedipalps.

 

I found a couple of goldenrod crab spider on, naturally, goldenrod.

This is one of the coolest spiders–an ant mimic. It looks like an ant, even more so when you are not looking at it magnified like this, because it's the size of a small ant, but look closely and you can see that it has eight legs, and has two body segments, not three. It also has chelicerae instead of mandibles, although you can't see its face very well here. But you can see that it has eyes like a spider, not like an ant.

 

 

 

 

 

My Friend the Mosquito

 The enemy of my enemy is my friend, they say. Well, that means today's Backyard Bug of the Day is my friend, and yours too.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Elephant mosquito. Named for their size, not because they feed on elephants, because they don't. Elephant mosquitos do not feed on blood at all, either male or female. Note its feeding tube sucking up the nectar of the goldenrod flowers. But their larvae do eat the larvae of other mosquito species, including ones that do bite. So they should be loved, not hated. They are also quite pretty; although I wasn't able to get an angle that showed the pretty colors very well I think you can see hints of blue.

 

It raised that leg to shoo away another insect that tried to land on that plant.

  And right now there is a mosquito buzzing around my living room, and I can't seem to kill it. 

I posted about some huge fungi in my backyard last week, so here's an update: They are even huger now:

This is a giant puffball mushroom. It is NOT the biggest one.  I have heard they are edible, but I am not going to be eating any mushrooms out of my backyard. This is significantly bigger than it was last week.

I think this is a fungus, too. I have seen these in the woods occasionally over the summer. 

And of course, frogs:

Last year for most of the summer and fall the stream was dry, so we didn't see frogs. I am enjoying seeing them this year.

Today the bees were not interested in the autumn joy sedum; the goldenrod was the flower of the hour:

If you look closely you can see a sweat bee in flight.

Yeah, these seem pretty gregarious.

Arachnid Appreciation:

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The orb weaver on my living room window. I think you can just see the web. It is very close to the window, so I wonder how effective it is going to be. The black shape is a falcon decal that is supposed to keep birds from flying into the window.

I found a couple of nursery web spiders in the bed with the autumn joy sedum. I don't know why, but I find them there every year:

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.

Nuts

 I walked outside to go for my walk today and encountered today's Backyard Bugs of the Day on a tree, almost at eye level. I do so enjoy when I don't have to work hard to find something.

Backyard Bugs of the Day:

These might be walnut caterpillars, one of the datana family. And that might be a walnut tree. I don't know, I am terrible at tree identification. It has never had nuts on it before, but it is a fairly young tree.

By the time I got back from my walk all of those caterpillars on the left were over on the right.

I didn't do a bug walk, in part because by the time I went out today it was heading toward dusk. So that is all I have for insects. But while I was inside, sitting on the couch, I saw a spider zoom upward in front of the living room window, and realized it may be working on a web out there. So I climbed up onto the window seat, and now I have a cool spider for Arachnid Appreciation:

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This orb weaver was climbing up a thread and then sort of tumbling back down like an acrobat doing an aerial silk routine. With actual silk.

Then she started climbing up, gathering the thread up. She will then have eaten it. I should have checked later to see if she built a web there.