The Bugs in the Backyard

Sunday, May 1, 2022

No Mow

Happy First Day of May! Or, as I will be observing it, First Day of No Mow May! Once again I am participating in No Mow May, in which people do not mow their lawns for the month of May. Why?

Because of this:

And this:

(Just in case you are straining your eyes trying to find bugs in these last two pictures, there aren't any). In May, if you don't mow your lawn (and don't treat it with herbicides), it gives a chance for spring ephemerals to grow and bloom, and to provide an early food source for pollinators. If you want them to pollinate food crops later on, they have to have something to eat now. If I mowed now, all of these beautiful flowers (and others I did not photograph) would be chopped down. The bees and other pollinators would lose their food source, and I would lose the loveliness.

I saw a lot of bugs today, mostly bees and flies, and all in too much of a hurry to feed on nectar to have their pictures taken. I saw two species of butterflies, both flying past me without pausing, and quite a few tiny spiders.

Also... Backyard Bug of the Day:

Assassin bug nymph. Because if there are all these other bugs flying around, then there will be something there to eat them.

There are lots of things blooming right now:

Bleeding heart. This is not a wildflower, I planted it.

Sassafrass tree

Dogwood tree

Flowering crab apple. I didn't see many bees on these, which made me surprised and disappointed.

My peach tree only has maybe 5 flowers on it. It is not doing well.

Here are some shots I took in the woods today and yesterday, now that my knee is finally well enough to get out there:

Violets. Not one I see much in the woods, they are more of an edge of the woods clearing kind of flower. Or lawn flower. Not middle of the woods emerging from the leaf litter flower.

Wood anemone. These were just on the verge of blooming when I went for a walk in the woods the day before my surgery, and I was worried that they would be done blooming before I could get out there again; spring ephemerals are ephemeral. I was happy to find they are still blooming.

A little bit of greening happening up in the tree canopy.

Gray tree frog. It seems to be emerging out of a hole, and I wonder if it is emerging from winter hibernation. It was a lovely day for it.

Fern fiddleheads and a flower I have still not identified yet. Or maybe I identified it last year, but I don't remember what it is.

Okay, you came here for bugs, so now for more bugs:

Click beetle. Lately when I have been trying to take pictures of bugs they have been doing this weird and annoying thing of landing right next to me in my shadow. I then have to move so they are in the light, and that scares them away. This is the moment of taking flight because I annoyed the beetle by moving.

Also annoying: right now all the bugs are at or near ground level, which is never the easiest way to get pictures, but it harder right now because I can't crouch due to my knee.

Case in point: this stinkbug on the floor in my dining room.

We had to go out and run an errand this evening, and got home after dark, and there were a few bugs on the porch, attracted to the light:

Geometer moth

Midge

Moth

This beetle is not dead, it is just pretending because I tried to take its picture while it was on the wall, and it did not like that, so it dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead.

I know in my last post I said I was going to try to blog once a week or so, but I said that two days before I had knee surgery. Taking pictures, and even walking around the backyard, has been a bit challenging in the interim. I tried a couple of times, but here's one of only two pictures I have from that time:

A pair of crane flies on the front porch screen door.

The other picture is in Arachnid Appreciation:

I was sitting on the couch one evening, with an ice pack strapped to my knee, and this spider appeared, marching right toward the couch. It was huge, and not keen on being captured in my bug vacuum. I am glad I caught it, because I would not have been keen on knowing it was walking around if I didn't catch it. So, here it is in the bug vacuum, annoyed. I took it outside, and under normal circumstances I would have taken photos of it out there, but it was raining, and I couldn't really walk down the porch steps because of my knee.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

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.