Waspish

I didn't think I was going to be able to blog today, because we were gone from morning to evening, and I thought it would be too dark when I got home to find anything. It also started raining a bit as we got close to home, so I thought I wouldn't even be able to go out and look. For me it wouldn't have been a totally bugless day, because the museums I went to today had some insects in them, in the form of embroidery on a quilt, a butterfly collection, some photographs taken with a microscope, and an Andy Warhol painting, but I couldn't post those here, even if it was looking hopeless on the drive home. But the rain was a scattered shower that was scattered elsewhere, and it wasn't as dark as I had feared (in spite of the gloomy clouds), and I was able to find a decent number of bugs.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Ha! You know, this is sometimes how you find bugs, just seeing a tiny speck of color somewhere.

 Cuckoo wasp. This is one of the most beautiful of the bugs that I see in my backyard. It is a parasitic wasp, but I don't remember what it parasitizes. It was so complacent about me taking its picture that I thought it was dead.

 So I poked it and it crawled away a bit. Still alive, though it was still kind of sluggish. There was a spider nearby, and I began to wonder if it had been bitten, and was feeling the effects of the spider bite–in other words, dissolving on the inside.

 I especially thought that when it stopped crawling and sort of curled up again.

 But then it suddenly perked up.

 It got really perky. And active. This is what you get when you try to take pictures of an active bug in low light. I should point out that in spite of my assertiveness with the camera, and the position of my hand on the plant, less than an inch from the wasp most of the time, and the fact that I actually prodded the wasp with my finger, I did not get stung.

 Still, it's beautiful.

Other Bugs:

 The monarch caterpillar in the dining room spent all day yesterday in the same spot, not eating, not moving. I thought maybe it was getting ready to molt. Then late last night it had finally moved, and I found this. Some caterpillars, including monarchs, eat the skin they shed when they molt, but their face is made of something like a dragonfly's wings (chitin), and then don't eat that. They just... let it drop. It's like a caterpillar mask.

A couple of bugs on a grass seed head, and I think the discarded exoskeleton of something. I didn't get a good look at that before it fell off the plant.

 Sawfly larva

 Cockroach

 Immature tree cricket

 The dragonfly streak continues.

Cabbage white butterfly

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Flower crab spiders are definitely the Arachnids of the Day:

This is the one that I thought might have bitten the cuckoo wasp.

There's a tiny beetle on the next petal over...