Blooming Buffet

I suppose this is probably true for any kind of wildlife photography: if you want to find bugs, go where their food is. Of course, bugs eat all kinds of different things, and at a time of year when everything is covered in leaves or blooming flowers, that is just about everywhere, but in particular I have found that in my backyard, whatever it is that has just come into full bloom will be full of insects.

Today's Backyard Blooming Bug Buffet:

 Daisy fleabane. The most popular flower in the backyard today.

 It attracted flies...

 That's a better look.

 This looks like a carpet beetle... well, it's a beetle of some kind.

 Honey bee

 Looper caterpillar

 Another bee

And another

 Hover fly

 I know this looks like a pile of detritus, but I think it is a larva that has stuck detritus to its back so that it will look like a pile of detritus. It happens. I can't tell 100% though, because this was really small. It could just be a pile of detritus.

This thorn mimic plant hopper was on the stem of a daisy fleabane plant.

 It is possible that part of the reason that the daisy fleabane is so popular right now is because the milkweed is just not very robust this year. Many of the plants have no flowers or buds at all, and a lot of the ones that are blooming have sparser flowers than usual.

 A few earwigs seem to like it, though...

 Female on the left, male on the right.

 A bee on a milkweed leaf

Coming soon to the Backyard Blooming Bug Buffet: purple coneflower

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Little wood satyr butterfly.

 This is just as it flew away, and gives the only glimpse I got of the dorsal side of the wings.

Random Bugs:

 Four lined leaf bug. I have been seeing these for weeks, but since the first ones I spotted (and made BBotD) weeks ago, they have all been extremely camera shy.

The last few days I have been seeing quite a few ladybeetles:

 I don't know why there was a puddle on this leaf, or why the ladybeetle was sitting in it.

 Different species - this one has an aphid in its jaws.

Yet another species - I think this one also has an aphid, and if you look closely you can see that there are other aphids nearby, perhaps soon to be eaten by this ladybeetle.

 Hoverfly on tall cinquefoil.

 

 Caterpillar

 

 Skipper

 This is the same skipper. I have never seen a skipper close its wings like that.

 Assassin bug. Check out that proboscis.

 Hopper nymph

 Hopper with a damaged wing. It was still able to fly away, though.

 I think this might be the same kind of fly that I saw on the daisy fleabane.

 Moth. This was a pretty tiny moth, about a quarter inch long.

Another tiny moth

 Here's a bug-finding eye test for you.

 Immature katydid

 Beetle larva

I should probably have made this Backyard Co-Bug of the Day. It is clearly some kind of hopper-like bug, and it appears to be immature, but I don't know exactly what it is. I found three of them on a tree trunk, each one just above something jutting out of the trunk - leaves in the case of 2 of them, and a stub of a long-ago-broken branch for the other. They all blended in really well, and in the case of the first one especially, I had to look really close to see if I was really seeing a bug.

 This is the second one.

 The third one walked away when I tried to get its picture.

The eastern tiger swallowtail caterpillar I adopted has entered the next instar - it has changed color a bit to be slightly greenish, and has blue dots.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Isn't it just wonderful that there are purple spiders in the world?

I think this spider is from the genus Micrathena, but that is all I know about what it is. This one is in the process of building a web.

I often walk through spider threads that are stretched across the paths in my backyard, because I don't see them until I have walked into them. They are usually about the height of my face, which makes the experience of walking through them quite unpleasant. I almost walked right into this spider that was on one of those threads, right at my face level. I think this is also a Micrathena spider. It appears to have a ball of insects there.