Blooming Buffet

I suppose this is probably true for any kind of wildlife photography: if you want to find bugs, go where their food is. Of course, bugs eat all kinds of different things, and at a time of year when everything is covered in leaves or blooming flowers, that is just about everywhere, but in particular I have found that in my backyard, whatever it is that has just come into full bloom will be full of insects.

Today's Backyard Blooming Bug Buffet:

 Daisy fleabane. The most popular flower in the backyard today.

 It attracted flies...

 That's a better look.

 This looks like a carpet beetle... well, it's a beetle of some kind.

 Honey bee

 Looper caterpillar

 Another bee

And another

 Hover fly

 I know this looks like a pile of detritus, but I think it is a larva that has stuck detritus to its back so that it will look like a pile of detritus. It happens. I can't tell 100% though, because this was really small. It could just be a pile of detritus.

This thorn mimic plant hopper was on the stem of a daisy fleabane plant.

 It is possible that part of the reason that the daisy fleabane is so popular right now is because the milkweed is just not very robust this year. Many of the plants have no flowers or buds at all, and a lot of the ones that are blooming have sparser flowers than usual.

 A few earwigs seem to like it, though...

 Female on the left, male on the right.

 A bee on a milkweed leaf

Coming soon to the Backyard Blooming Bug Buffet: purple coneflower

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Little wood satyr butterfly.

 This is just as it flew away, and gives the only glimpse I got of the dorsal side of the wings.

Random Bugs:

 Four lined leaf bug. I have been seeing these for weeks, but since the first ones I spotted (and made BBotD) weeks ago, they have all been extremely camera shy.

The last few days I have been seeing quite a few ladybeetles:

 I don't know why there was a puddle on this leaf, or why the ladybeetle was sitting in it.

 Different species - this one has an aphid in its jaws.

Yet another species - I think this one also has an aphid, and if you look closely you can see that there are other aphids nearby, perhaps soon to be eaten by this ladybeetle.

 Hoverfly on tall cinquefoil.

 

 Caterpillar

 

 Skipper

 This is the same skipper. I have never seen a skipper close its wings like that.

 Assassin bug. Check out that proboscis.

 Hopper nymph

 Hopper with a damaged wing. It was still able to fly away, though.

 I think this might be the same kind of fly that I saw on the daisy fleabane.

 Moth. This was a pretty tiny moth, about a quarter inch long.

Another tiny moth

 Here's a bug-finding eye test for you.

 Immature katydid

 Beetle larva

I should probably have made this Backyard Co-Bug of the Day. It is clearly some kind of hopper-like bug, and it appears to be immature, but I don't know exactly what it is. I found three of them on a tree trunk, each one just above something jutting out of the trunk - leaves in the case of 2 of them, and a stub of a long-ago-broken branch for the other. They all blended in really well, and in the case of the first one especially, I had to look really close to see if I was really seeing a bug.

 This is the second one.

 The third one walked away when I tried to get its picture.

The eastern tiger swallowtail caterpillar I adopted has entered the next instar - it has changed color a bit to be slightly greenish, and has blue dots.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Isn't it just wonderful that there are purple spiders in the world?

I think this spider is from the genus Micrathena, but that is all I know about what it is. This one is in the process of building a web.

I often walk through spider threads that are stretched across the paths in my backyard, because I don't see them until I have walked into them. They are usually about the height of my face, which makes the experience of walking through them quite unpleasant. I almost walked right into this spider that was on one of those threads, right at my face level. I think this is also a Micrathena spider. It appears to have a ball of insects there.

Porch Light

 Drat - loading the pictures took so long that I lost track of the time, and posted a minute too late. This is the blog for THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2016.

We went out last night, and because it was still light outside when we left the house, I forgot to turn on the porch light for when we got home. It's not a big deal as far as getting in the house, but in reality the reason I had intended to turn on the light was because I was hoping for some bugs to be on the porch when we got home. So, when we got home I turned on the porch light with the intention of going outside to see what was attracted to it. Then I forgot about it for a few hours, until it was after midnight - in other words, today. I went out after I finished writing my blog, and found a bona fide Porch Light Lepidoptera Lollapalooza!

 I didn't count how many species of moths there were, but there are 4 in this shot, covering about a foot of wall space (and a few other little bugs).

 This spot underneath the light was very popular. Some of the moths stayed there the whole time I was out watching them, but others came and went.

Now a closer look at some of the moths:

 Plume moth

 I would say about half of the moths on the porch were this species.

 Finally! The eight spotted forester moth sits still for a picture!

 

 This is a species of geometer moth, which are the ones that come from looper caterpillars.

 Quite a few of the moths were on the floor (In fact, I accidentally stepped on a couple, which I feel bad about).

 

 

 The moth on the left was the biggest of the ones on the porch, about 3 inches wide. There were many that were much smaller, fractions of an inch long. Also in this shot, an ant, which is a very unusual nighttime porch visitor.

 A lot of the moths kept landing on me (I had to make sure to keep my mouth closed), and this one sat on my hand, vibrating its wings.

 

 Ailanthus webworm moth

 This one's wings were vibrating, too.

There were lots of other insects on the porch last night other than moths, which brings us to Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

This is a treehopper from the genus Glossonotus, but my book doesn't have the species. This is a brand new species for me, so I was very excited to find it. I almost didn't really look at it - sometimes I will see something and think I know what it is, and think it is not interesting enough to look at closely, but something makes me change my mind and check it out, and I find out it is quite interesting indeed - that was what happened with this amazing bug.

 Green lacewing

 There were quite a lot of hoppers on the porch, many of them really, really tiny (and I didn't get pictures of any of those, because they were too hoppy), but I did photograph a couple...

 

 This looks a lot like a cranefly, but it is really small. I don't know if craneflies come this small.

 Beetle

 Ichneumon wasp, I think.

 

 Fly.

These are not all of the insects - moth or otherwise - that were on the porch last night. I took over 150 pictures, and after finding so many species in that brief time late at night (while listening to owls have a wacky conversation in the trees nearby, where I could hear but not see them), I decided I wasn't going to do a bug walk today, partly because I am lazy, and partly because I didn't want to find something else amazing after already finding a Backyard Bug of the Day. But then I happened to be looking out the window in the afternoon and saw a butterfly that looked like it might be cooperative, so I grabbed my camera and went out.

The butterfly in question was a swallowtail (I don't know what species), and not all that cooperative after all.

But before I could go inside after the swallowtail flew away, I spotted another butterfly, which is Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

This is a species of butterfly I have never seen before anywhere, much less in my backyard - a Baltimore checkerspot. There are two things that are thrilling about this - one, that I saw a brand new species of butterfly in my backyard, and two, that I was actually able to find it in my not-very-comprehensive butterfly book.

So, still determined not to do a bug walk, I spotted this:

Robberfly. It was so cooperative I just had to take a picture.

I didn't see any woolly aphids flying around today, but I did spot this one on a leaf before going into the house. It is only when I looked at it on the computer that I realized it is lying on its back. I have no idea why. It was alive, though, because it flew off while I was adjusting the settings on my camera (I did not see it fly off, so I was not lying when I said I didn't see any flying today).