Making Observations and Hypothesizing

I'm not one for strict routines in life, but for things that you have to do regularly, like brushing your teeth, it's good to have them so that you don't forget to do those things you have to do. I try not to be too reliant on routine for some things, though, like my bugs walks; I don't walk around the backyard in the same patterns every day, because you see things differently depending on the direction you approach from, and I like to get different points of view. I know I am missing a lot of what I pass by, but I want to make sure that at least I am seeing different angles on things. It probably doesn't make any difference, whatever I find is generally all determined by serendipity, but still. However, I do develop routines of when I am going to do my bug walk in certain seasons - mainly in the summer, when I will, for instance, do my bug walk and then go pick up the mail from the mailbox. The reason I do this is because in the summer I almost always see something when I go outside for any reason, but I don't want to take my camera with me just to go to the mailbox, so I make my daily trip to the mailbox at a time when I already have my camera with me. This time of year, though, I hardly find anything on my bug walk, much less on a brief walk down to the street to get the mail, so I don't have that routine - I get the mail when I feel like it, and do my bug walk whenever is convenient, or not raining, as the weather may be. So today when I saw an interesting bug on my way into the house with the mail, I had to dash inside, dump the mail, and grab my camera to go back outside. The interesting bug was in the rock garden, and though it was, of course, gone by the time I got out there, I found so many bugs in the rock garden today that I spent quite a while out there taking pictures of them. I did eventually find another of what I thought I saw in the first place, but more on that anon.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I think this is a male sawfly. I spotted it on the bush in the rock garden. Then I noticed that there were a lot of them on that bush. It was a lovely blue, and you know I am a sucker for blue bugs.

 Okay, so it only looks blue when the light hits it from certain directions, but at least sometimes it looks blue.

 Interesting face...

 Zoomed-in shot of the above, so you can see the pincher face.

 Anyway, these sawflies were all over that bush, too. More than I have ever seen there. (I never noticed their pincher faces, either).

 Then I noticed that the smaller, blue-and-yellow sawflies were behaving aggressively toward the orange-headed sawflies, and thought maybe this was a territorial thing.

 Because the blue-and-yellow ones, which were smaller, by the way, chased away the orange-headed one here.

 But then I saw another group of them, two blue-and-yellow, and one orange-headed one.

 That's when it occurred to me that perhaps these were not two different species, but the same species, male and female. My hypothesis at this point was that the orange-headed ones are female, and the blue-and-yellow ones are males.

 I saw a lot of females just sitting on needles of the piney bush (these are on the creeping myrtle underneath the bush), and the females flying from place to place, or walking around on the needles. Often the males would land near the females, and the females would walk away. Sometimes they would sit for a while, but mostly they would walk away, especially if the males touched them.

 There was a lot of this chasing going on.

 You can see a few larvae in the lower left corner here...

 I kept looking for a pair that were mating, to confirm my male/female of the same species hypothesis, but I never did find any. These two looked promising, because the female didn't move away, and I watched the two of them for a while. In fact, they barely moved.

 Then I realized that the female was laying eggs. I have no idea what the male is doing. At any rate, this does appear to confirm at least that the orange-headed ones are females, but it doesn't prove anything about the blue-and-yellow. Although I supposed that some of the orange-headed ones could be male, if these are not the same species, and I have proven nothing.

 Another female laying eggs.

Now, here are some hatched larvae, and some unhatched eggs, and the source of some confusion on my part. I did try to look up whether these were male and female of the same species of sawfly, and I wasn't able to find out, either in my books or online. But I did find some information I didn't know before, such as that they are called sawflies because the females have saw-like genitalia, which they use to cut open stems/needles/whatever a particular species lays eggs on, in order to insert the eggs inside. And the eggs I have seen on this plant before all appear to have been laid inside the needles. Here you can see that they are bursting out, which I would guess means they are going to hatch soon. But the eggs I saw laid today were on the surface of the needles. Were those not sawflies? Were they not whatever these larvae are? I don't know. And since the only thing I could find in any of my books that resembled either of these is a species of sawfly that the book said is found west of the Rockies, I don't know if that's what this is. But it only showed one that looks like the female, not one that looks like the one I think is the male.

I do know this - these sawflies almost killed that bush last year, and it looks like there is going to be a terrible infestation this year. You know I am all for live and let live, and I don't like to kill bugs, but if they are going to kill this bush, I am going to fight back on its behalf (and, based on my research attempt, these might be an introduced species, if not necessarily an invasive one, and therefore they don't really belong in this environment). And that is all I am going to say on that subject.

There were other bugs in the rock garden:

 Bumblebees, two of which you can see here. I almost stepped on them. Once of them appears to be rather wet, for reasons unknown to me. Yes, it did rain all day yesterday (the reason there was no post yesterday), but why this bee should be wet now, I have no idea. Again the bees were more interested in crawling around on the ground than visiting the flowers.

 The bedraggled bee

There were a couple of flies in the rock garden, too:

As for the rest of the backyard... The rock garden was teeming with insect life - all those sawflies, including larvae, several bumblebees, other flies, and who knows what else I missed. In comparison, the rest of the backyard was a bit of a wasteland. It makes sense, really - the rock garden is a warmer spot, there are a lot of flowers blooming, and there is that evergreen bush that is a host plant of the sawflies, so it makes sense that there are a lot of them there. Whereas the rest of the backyard is still mostly asleep, and this cold week has probably caused it to hit the snooze alarm. I did find a couple of bugs out there, though:

 A candy striped leafhopper whom I believe was questioning its decision to come outside on such a cold day (Okay, it was in the 50s, but it was raw and yucky).

 A lonely ant

 And a tiny wasp

 Spreading its wings

I didn't see any of the sawflies mating, but I did see some winter fireflies propagating their species:

 This tree had a lot of winter fireflies on it. There are three in this shot.

 I found some flies passing on their genes as well.

And I found the first dandelion of the season. I didn't tell it that there is snow in the forecast for tomorrow night. I didn't want to depress it, like the daffodils.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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