What Season Is This?

There are no crickets singing in the darkness tonight. There are no tree frogs calling. There are no fireflies flitting across the sky. At 2:00 this afternoon it was sunny and bright, and 77ºF. By 2:30 a forbidding gloom had set in, and the temperature had dropped to 70ºF. Then, the very moment I was about to step out the back door to go look for bugs, the first droplets of rain fell, and the thunder began to rumble. When the rain stopped around 6:00, and I was finally able to go outside for my bug walk, the temperature was 59ºF. I cannot hear the breeze that is tossing the tree branches, because we had to close the windows; it is now 54ºF and falling. I don't know if this is the planet reminding us that it is not truly summer yet, or that the seasons really mean nothing, at least as far as the weather is concerned.

As you can probably guess, I did not find a lot of bugs today.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This might be a new one for me - it's hard to tell at this point. This is a Hemiptera, and there are a lot of them that look basically like this, in a large variety of colors and patterns. This color combo doesn't look familiar, which is why I think it might be one I have not seen before, but I can't be sure. I would guess from its basic appearance that it is some sort of leaf bug, but I don't know enough about Hemiptera to be sure - it could be an assassin for all I know. But I am guessing leaf bug.

One thing about cold weather is that it does make some bugs more cooperative:

 Hoverfly. One of the things I have learned from my insect observations over the last several years is how much I don't know about them, and yet, I now know SO MUCH more than I knew before I got a macro lens and started using it to look at bugs up close. There was a lot that I thought I knew that was wrong, based on either misinformation or just incorrect assumptions. Take this insect here, the hoverfly. Before I got into insect observation, I saw an insect that had black and yellow stripes that visited flowers, and I assumed it was a bee. That's what I thought these were, tiny bees, and therefore I assumed they could sting me. But it's not a bee. It's a fly. It can't sting me, because it doesn't have a stinger. From there you being to realize that it is not just bees that pollinate plants, and you begin to discover how many incredible insects there are in the world that you never even imagined. As for the hoverfly, it's beautiful. I especially like what looks like a sapphire on top of its head. Normally hoverflies don't pose so cooperatively, so I don't often get such close-up pictures of them, but it was a chilly today, so this one was fairly compliant. Up until it got annoyed and flew away.

 I did get a nice shot of its face, though.

 Wasp

 Beetle. There are so many kinds of beetles, and like Hemiptera, Coleoptera (beetles) have some species that eat plants, and some species that eat animals (other bugs, but also things like carrion), and in most cases I can't tell what a particular species eats unless I see it eating. Like this beetle eating an aphid.

 As I have mentioned, I have not seen many bees around lately, but just as I was finishing up my bug walk I found this one next to the back door. It was doing a lot of grooming, and then it flew off, without ever having posed nicely for me, so this is the best shot I got.

When my husband called me to dinner, he told me to bring my camera, which was an unexpected request. When I got to the kitchen he told me to look in the sink, and there was this moth, with its wing in a splodge of tomato sauce. I released it outside after taking its picture - the sink is not a safe place for a moth. It's a pretty decent size for a moth - about 2 1/2 inches across, I would say. Not that that is BIG for a moth, when you think of luna moths or polyphemus moths, but for the kind that sneak into the house when you're coming in the door, it's a big one.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Can you find the bowl and doily spider? I guess it's not that hard. I sometimes wonder what spiders think when this kind of thing happens, and their webs are soaked with rain.

I don't remember if I have seen this kind of spider this week. If I have, today is the end of my streak of finding different species of spiders every day.