April Flowers Bring...

In case you're wondering about the sporadic nature of my posts lately, it is due to the vagaries of spring weather. If it's too cold for bugs, or too rainy for my camera, I don't have anything to post. I'm not being lazy, I just don't have anything to show you. The last few days have been both too cold AND too rainy. Today was finally nice - well, nice-ish. It was sunny. It wasn't as warm as the forecast said it would be, and it was really windy again, but it was sunny, and warm enough for a few bugs.

However, I found today's Backyard Bug of the Day last night. We got home just a few minutes after midnight, and it was warm enough last night that there were quite a lot of bugs attracted to the porch light. Most of them were those tiny black flies, but there was also something more flashy (and I don't mean a firefly).

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I thought that this might be one of those flies that just kind of looks like a wasp, but looking in one of my bug books, this might actually be a wasp. It might be something from the Ichneumon wasp family, possibly of the species Ophion. However, the book says that the species of Ichneumon wasps are almost impossible to identify sometimes, even for experts, and there are over 3,000 different kinds, so I am just going to go with maybe on this. Maybe it is an Ophion wasp.

A porch light bug watching session would be nothing without a couple of moths:

Here's one of the tiny flies that are not only all over the yard lately (on nice days), but were all over the porch last night:

This one wins the award for best antennae of the day.

Blooming flowers are a welcome sight in the backyard purely on their own merits, but they have something especially gratifying for someone like me, who is looking for bugs in the backyard...

Bugs, of course:

The first bee of the spring!

 This bee is the polleniest bee I have ever seen in my life.

 It's practically invisible due to pollen camouflage.

 I didn't even think it was going to be able to fly, but it did.

Here's a zoomed in look at that adorable face. And a lot of pollen.

There wasn't much else to see in the backyard today.

 Some ants on a tree (only one pictured here). Ants are another one of those things I thought I knew about before I started observing the bugs in my backyard. The live in holes in the ground and go to picnics, right? Well, I had no idea that they spend so much time in trees. I don't know what they are doing up there, because I can only see them walking up and down the trunk, but I see this pretty often. And it's not just solitary ants, it's a line of them, going up and down the trunks of trees. I don't know if they live up there and come down to find food, or vice versa. I never see them carrying food. But I do see a lot of ants marching up and down.

Yeah, it was slim pickings in the backyard today.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Jumping spider

 There are two arachnids to appreciate in this picture - a spider and a mite. Can you see both?

 How about now?

 The mite went into hiding - can you see the spider? You probably can't tell how small these are from the picture, but let me tell you, you should be mightily impressed at my spotting abilities for catching these.

 It's a scene I always find comical - a bug hiding behind a spider. Eight eyes, and yet they still can't see everywhere.

 An unfortunate spider indeed.

But in this zoomed in picture, look at those eyes!