Mum's the Word of the Day

I didn't have time to do a bug walk today, so I just spent a couple of minutes around the chrysanthemums. Even though we had a freeze again last night, there were a lot of bugs on the flowers, probably the most I have seen so far. It was mostly flies, but there was a bee and a wasp, too.

I didn't choose a Backyard Bug of the Day, because there wasn't anything I felt was worthy. So, here's just a bunch of pictures of insects on flowers.

 Bee mimics are the predominant visitors to the mums. Way more mimics than actual bees. This one does a very good bee impersonation.

 Wasp

Some of them rested on the creeping myrtle for a while:

 Bumblebee

 I'm not just showing the same fly over and over (though I probably did get it more than once). There were several of these.

 The bee is covered with pollen.

 Wasp and hoverfly

 Hoverfly

Frost

We had our first freeze of the season last night? But did the bugs care? The crickets were singing this afternoon, and there were bugs to be found, so many of them didn't mind it. They might feel a bit differently if the long range forecast for snow next week comes true, but even so, if the snow melts because the temperature goes back up into the 40s or above, there will be bugs around still.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Beetle

I was out before dawn today, when the temperature was below freezing, but when I got home in the afternoon I heard the crickets as soon as I got out of the car, so I knew there were bugs around. I went inside to get my camera, and as soon as I walked out the back door I found my first insect:

 Springtail. Of course, you see those on the warmer winter days, so clearly a bit of cold isn't much to this critter.

The rock garden is by the side of the house that gets the most afternoon sunshine, and that side of the house is very popular for basking:

 Mostly flies, of various species, and one grasshopper.

 They like the foundation, too.

Caterpillars like to bask, too.

 Grasshopper

 Tree cricket

 And rounding out the three kinds of insects in the order Orthoptera, a katydid.

 

 Some insects just bask on the rocks in the rock garden, like this grasshopper.

 Every year around this time I take almost this identical picture. Small red dragonfly on a dead leaf near the mailbox.

 Tree cricket, female

Tree cricket, male. Different tree. I'm not sure if it's the same species of tree cricket.

 March fly

I realized today that I hadn't seen any of the milkweed bug nymphs since I got home, and so I went looking for them on the plant where they'd been hanging out for weeks. They were inside one of the open seed pods. When I touched it, the seeds all fell out, with a couple of the milkweed bugs:

 I found a bunch more in another pod. They are in various stages of development, but I still can't tell which kind of milkweed bug they are. Note the object next to the one on the lower left: that is an exuvia from one that has molted.

 This one has recently molted, and hasn't developed its full color yet.

We went out this evening, and though it was cold, there were a few bugs on the porch when we got home:

 

 Cockroach

 Woolly bear with interesting coloring–mostly black, with an unusually narrow brown band.

 Tree cricket

Bug Boundaries

Having spent so much time today on working on yesterday's blog I lost time for other things, and now find myself starting this blog post much too late. So I don't have much to say except that today was sunny, but colder, and still pretty windy. The number of crickets to be heard has diminished quite a bit. The number of bugs to be found today was much lower than yesterday. Today felt like a completely new season compared to the past few days.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 I think this is a different species of grasshopper than the ones I see in the rock garden all the time. Interestingly, it was also in a part of the backyard where I am not sure I have ever seen a grasshopper. Different insects have their own habitats even within the bounds of a single acre.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 Some kind of Hemiptera

Because of the snafu of uploading these pictures, and the fact that this blog is a day late as a result, and I will still have to post another blog tonight, I am just going to keep the rest of these in the order in which they (finally) uploaded.

The mums attracted multiple species of pollinating flies again, of course:

 Cricket

 Yesterday I saw a variety of hoppers, but today there was only this species. I did see them all over the backyard, though.

 For months there were ants tending to little herds of these hoppers on this particular plant. The ants raised the hoppers from nymphs, and they were all over the plant, almost every leaf hosting at least a few hoppers, but sometimes at least a dozen or so, tended to by ants. Today there was only one hopper left, all alone, with neither kin nor ants as company.

 Woolly aphid

 Twice-stabbed lady beetle

 Fly

 Leaf-footed bug

 

 I found this curious thing. It looks like a chrysalis on a leaf, but I think it is actually a chrysalis inside a leaf. There are insects that feed inside leaves, between the thin layers that make up a leaf. It looks like that is what happened here, and when it grew big enough, it pupated inside? There is definitely an opening where something could have crawled out (or a predator broke in).

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Bold jumping spider. You can just barely see the beautiful green chelicera. If only its pedipalps were open.

 

 I wonder if you can see what I did not notice when I took this picture?