The Bugs in the Backyard: Dressing for the Occasion

There are a variety of factors that must be considered when getting dressed in the morning, from the weather to my plans for the day: what am I going to be doing, and where will I be going? Today I put on my Lepidoptera t-shirt (butterflies and moths. It does actually say Lepidoptera on the shirt, Field Guide to North American Lepidoptera, to be specific), suitable for the plans I had for the day (not all of which came to fruition), but also with the humorous thought that if I wore a t-shirt with butterflies on it, maybe it would attract butterflies.

Mission accomplished.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Spring azure butterfly. The dorsal side of its wings is a gorgeous blue, but you can really only see it when it's flying, because it doesn't rest with its wings open.

This picture is not upside-down. You can see a hint of the blue color of the wings on the back of the butterfly's body.

I saw three species of butterflies today: the spring azure, something I have never seen before and can't identify (and also didn't even come close to getting a picture of), and a mourning cloak. Mourning cloaks overwinter as adults, nestled in tree bark or wood piles, or other such places, then they emerge again in the spring. When you see them in the spring they often look kind of beat up. I saw this one flying, and I asked it to land so I could take its picture. It did:

But not for long, so I didn't get a good picture.

Today was a VERY buggy day in the backyard, and the vast majority of the bugs were to be seen in the rock garden, primarily because the rock garden currently looks like this:

As you might imagine, there were a LOT of bees. I got very few pictures, because the bees were very busy and fast, but there were many species among the blooms. It was interesting to stand there for a while and watch the insect life. There were things flying above, and things crawling below. I got a couple of glimpses (but alas, no pictures) of a bee fly, a wonderfully odd little creature. Well, not odd, really, but a little bit silly. I first spotted the spring azure there, although that's not where I got the pictures of it.

A rare bee that sat for me.

This one rested briefly on one of the rocks in the rock garden.

There were also a lot of ants in the rock garden; I could see them beneath the plants, mostly dragging bits of plant matter with them. It's not easy to do that over rocks but under vines. At one point I saw what seemed to be an awfully large ant dragging something even larger, and I followed it with my eyes until it emerged onto a rock, when I saw this:

It was not an ant, it was a wasp. I am guessing some kind of parasitic wasp, and it has either laid an egg in this cricket, or killed/stunned the cricket and was dragging it off to deposit it in a hole with its offspring for the larva to feed on it.

It dragged the cricket off the rock, and through the vines...

Then across the front walk, and off into the lawn... I watched it drag the cricket about 12 feet, mostly on the ground, but with a couple of short bursts of flight. At one point an ant came poking around, and was pushed away. Sometimes it would drop the cricket and look around for a while. Eventually I got distracted by something else for a few seconds and lost it.

Some other things are blooming:

The first dandelions

Leafy spurge - always attractive to ants.

Beetle

Fly

Nymph of some kind of hopper, but I don't know what kind. It was on one of the hazelnut bushes, and I accidentally knocked it on the ground. It's pretty big for a nymph, but that is definitely what it looks like, and it did hop away eventually. My guess would be that it overwintered underground and has just crawled out.