Sweet Surprises

I had a couple of pleasant surprises today in the backyard. Well, one of them was in the front yard. In the mailbox, to be exact. And it wasn't the postal carrier who put it there.

 Remember yesterday I posted a picture of a caterpillar way in the back of the mailbox? Well, sometime between then and this afternoon it turned into a chrysalis. That brown thing in the middle of the picture is the chrysalis. The fuzzy thing to the left of it is the leftover skin from its final moult just before becoming a chrysalis. I couldn't tell what kind of caterpillar it was from what I was able to see of it yesterday, so I don't know what it will become, but I did read somewhere that butterfly caterpillars make a chrysalis, and moth caterpillars make a cocoon (with a chrysalis inside). I read this on the internet, so I don't know if it's true, but if it is, this will be a butterfly. So now I will spend the next couple of weeks worrying that the mail is going to squish it, and hoping that if it manages to become whatever it is going to become, that it is I and not the postal carrier who gets to see it fly away.

 Next surprise - one of the eggs on the picnic umbrella has hatched! I am pretty sure this is a baby stinkbug. It looks like a lion mask. In the bottom of the photo you can see which egg it hatched from - it's white, and you can see that it is open. It looks like a few more are ready to go, too. It's a bit surprising that they don't all go at once - I would think they were all laid at once. On the other hand, I don't know that for sure, so I'll see what happens.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This is the nymph of some kind of hopper. I don't know which kind, and haven't been able to find out yet. It's a pretty astounding bug, the kind of bug you are surprised to find when you first start studying the bugs in your backyard, thinking up until that point that they are pretty ordinary. I posted a picture of this the other day, but this one is better, and today it's BBotD.

I hope I am not completely boring you with my milkweed bug pictures. I am trying to restrain myself, and not post the same bugs over and over, but sometimes I just get a picture I really like, and can't help it. I will try to focus on anything new I find. I will note, though, that for the last couple of days I haven't seen any large milkweed bugs or small milkweed bugs. I wonder where they've gone all of a sudden. Today it was mostly the usual suspects for Who's On the Milkweed Today?

 Except this one. Not that I have not seen this kind of bug in the backyard before. If I ever get a good picture of it it will be BBotD.

 Speaking of not very good pictures...

 No idea what's going on here...

 How many plume moths can you see?

 How about now?

Random Bugs:

 There are plume moths everywhere. In fact, there are just moths in general everywhere, fluttering around my as I do my bug walk. They seldom land where I can take their pictures, though.

 Tiny katydid

I like that it is posed on a daisy, a common flower that perhaps gives you a sense of scale.

I did get one shot of a moth in the wild...

Right now there is a bug on the window screen making funny noises, like it's saying, "Pssst!" and trying to get my attention...

 Caterpillars are mostly muscles, and this looks like a pretty impressive display of ab strength (not that they have 'abs', so to speak), except that what you can't see is that it is supported by a silk thread attached to the vine above.

 Hemiptera are categorized as such based on their mouth parts, which have a proboscis, a kind of tube, that they use for sucking. It's not based on what they like to suck from, either the juices of plants, or the innards of other insects. There are also a lot of Hemiptera that look pretty much alike, and I can't tell most of them apart. It's often not until I see one with a hapless insect that it has caught that I can tell that it is insectivorious. I have seen this one around quite a bit, and for some reason assumed it was a plant sucker. I guess I was wrong.

 These are so adorable. I have never seen so many together before (with a bonus other Hemiptera, too).

 The one on the lower right has just excreted some honeydew.

 Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Jumping spider on milkweed

 This gorgeous spider is not a jumping spider, but it did fling itself off this tree trunk onto my hand. It cause a very minor freak-out. Both spider and photographer emerged unscathed.