The Bugs in the Backyard: Not Boring

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but by two of the three measures, it is now summer! Those two measures would be social/traditional, in that in the United States summer unofficially begins on Memorial Day weekend, which was this past weekend, and meteorological, which marks the start of summer as June 1st. We are still waiting for astronomical summer in a few weeks, but if summer is a state of mind, or something you can assign an arbitrary beginning to, it is summer now. Which means it was cooler today, just to be contrary. But it felt good to me.

I mentioned seeing my first firefly of the summer last week, and when I have gone out to enjoy the night sky since then, I would see one firefly each time, until last night, when I finally saw multiple fireflies. It's impossible to count them, because you never know if you are seeing the same one in different places, but it was obvious that there were several fireflies flitting about - there was even one on the back porch with me. What I found interesting about that is that a couple of summers ago I saw my first fireflies that year on June 1st, and at the time I thought it was kind of funny that the quintessential summer bugs appeared on the first night of summer. So this year they didn't make their first appearance on the first night of summer, but it was the first night that there were many of them, which feels definitely more summery than only having one. And then tonight... not a single one.

I mention every once in a while how amazing it is to me that I continue to find new bugs in my backyard that I have never seen before, but I should not find it so amazing, not only because I know realistically that there are probably a million bugs there that I am just not seeing, but because I am actually aware of specific bugs that exist, and live in this part of the world, that I have never seen. Some of them I wish very much to see, like a stick bug, but others I have just seen in bug books, or other people's pictures, and know that they have never been seen by me in my backyard before. And yet, I still get a little thrill (or sometimes a big thrill, depending on the bug. You better believe I will be thrilled if I ever find a stick bug in my backyard) when I find something that is new to me. Which brings me to...

Backyard Bug of the Day:

When I first spotted this, I thought it was a beetle. Then I looked closer, and thought it was a mayfly. Then I looked closer, and thought it was a moth.

I am still pretty sure it is a moth, but I can't find anything even remotely similar in my book.

Here is a zoomed-in shot of the scales of the wing. When I was looking at it outside it looked black, but now it looks like it has a lot of colors mixed in, particularly blue. And its legs look blue.

Those wisps that curl over its head are interesting.

I wouldn't say that my bug walk today was boring, but I did see several borers:

This one is a honeysuckle borer.

And speaking of honeysuckle, I finally managed to identify a species of sawfly larva, and this one is a honeysuckle sawfly larva. I also found out (and I can't believe I didn't know this before, as it is in the bug book that I refer to as "my book" because it is the one I generally consult, and that would be Kaufman's Field Guide to Insects of North America) that sawflies are wasps. Stingless wasps. I thought that they were flies. Well, I always say you should try to learn something every day. And come to think of it, I might have read that before and forgotten it. Frankly, sawflies are kind of confusing sometimes. But now I know what this one is. It is on a honeysuckle leaf, by the way. I have seen these a few times before, and I don't think I have ever seen them eating. I have only ever seen them curled up like this.

And on that subject, of wasps, and sawflies...

I spotted this tiny wasp on this leaf. There's some things I should mention here: 1) It was coming on to evening, and this was in the shade, so the light wasn't great. 2) This wasp is very small. 3) The breeze was tossing the leaf about, so it was hard for me to even get a good look to focus, much less get a good picture. 4) This plant was in an awkward location. So that explains some of my slowness in picking up on things. Anyway, I saw this tiny bug, and decided to try to get a picture of it, in spite of it being in an awkward spot. What caught my eye were the iridescent wings, and the interesting angle of them. When I got close enough to get this picture, I could see that maybe it was a very small species of ichneumon wasp. If you remember what I have told you about them before, they lay their eggs in the larva of other insects. Well, from what I could see from this distance and the bouncing leaf, it looked like it was laying eggs (I am saying this based on its body movements).

Closer, but out of focus, picture. I thought it was odd, though, for it to be laying eggs on a leaf, not on larvae. But when it flew away, I took a closer look at the leaf...

... and saw that it was covered in sawfly larvae. Presumably some of these will not be developing into sawfly imagos, since they have now been parasitized with ichneumon eggs.

How about a test of your bug spotting skills?

Do you see the moth? (To be fair, I saw it because it flew past me and landed on the tree while I was watching it).

Do you see it now?

How about now? I really hope you can see it now.

Some kind of plant bug

European skipper. I had to lean into a thorn bush to get this shot, so I hope you appreciate it.

Tiny praying mantis

I came across this looper caterpillar, and noticed two things - that it was thrashing around in an agitated manner, and that its back end was covered in silk and apparently stuck to the leaf. It wasn't clear to me if some other insect had attacked it and attached that silk, or it the caterpillar had done it. I thought the latter was possible, because some species of caterpillar attach themselves to things with silk to anchor themselves when they make their cocoon/chrysalis. So it seemed possible to me that this caterpillar was getting ready to pupate.

It really seemed agitated though.

What I didn't notice until later, when I looked at the pictures on my computer, is that there is something strange going on underneath the caterpillar where the silk is.

Here's the above shot, zoomed-in. It looks like there's some sort of insect legs under there. And they definitely do not belong to this caterpillar!

However, at the time I didn't notice that, and I thought the caterpillar might be getting ready to pupate, so I came back later to check on it and found that it had gotten out of the silk bandage-like thing...

It was still crawling around on the same leaf, and was wrestling with strands of silk, but I am pretty sure those are its own strands - caterpillars have silk-producing glands near their mouths.

So, no idea what all of that was about...

And while we're on the subject of weird caterpillar behavior, here's the same caterpillar from yesterday, doing the same pose in a different place on the same plant. I saw it eating normally earlier in the day when I went out to get the mail, and then in the early evening it was back to caterpillar yoga.

Assassin bug

I don't know what this is. I don't know what kind of insect it is, and I am not sure if it is the actual insect (dead) or a discarded exoskeleton. I suspect it is the latter, because this has a real nymph-like look to it, so it could have molted into its next instar and left this behind.

It's quite the interesting creature.

And speaking of dead insects...

Here's a mosquito I smacked as it was trying to bite me.

Today was definitely a spiderific day in the backyard. I found three different species of spiders before I even found a single insect. I ended up finding 9 different species of spiders today, so there's a lot to appreciate for Arachnid Appreciation:
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1) I think this is a six-spotted orb weaver. It's a big one, if it is. The ones I usually see are about half this size at most, though I did see another big one a couple of weeks ago. It's not an especially big spider, in fact, it's a pretty small spider, it's just big from my experience of six-spotted orb weavers, if that's what this is. I didn't get a look at the dorsal side, where the spots are, but this is what ssows look like from underneath, and this is the kind of web they build, across a leaf, and it is underneath the web, as they generally are. So I think that is what it is. This was a big ssow web, too, spanning across three large leaves.

Closer look

Side view.

2) I was a bit confused about this one, until I realized that this is also an underside view, and it has prey in its grip. But I don't know what kind of spider it is.

4) Here's the view of the web...

... and here's the spider. I think this is the kind I saw all the babies of a few weeks ago.

There's a series for this next one, and the spider is hard to see in all of them.

5) This is a bowl-and-doily spider, and a beetle has just tumbled into its web. The spider is just about in the middle of the picture, underneath the bowl of the web. It's out of focus, mainly, and it is white with dark markings. The beetle should be more obvious, above it.

Here the beetle is trying to crawl out, and the spider, still underneath the bowl, is just barely visible if you follow the line of the beetle's body behind it.