Isn't It Romantic?

I am running so late right now...

Spring is such a romantic time of year, don't you think? Well, the insects do:

 Candy striped leaf hoppers

 

 Winter fireflies

More on the subject of arthropod romance in Arachnid Appreciation below...

Today was actually a day that felt like spring! The temperature was in the mid-60s when I went out to do my bug walk, and was in the mid-70s by the time I got back to the house! There were a LOT of bugs around today, in comparison to recent days, but I only got pictures of a few, because most of them were feeling zippy from the warm weather and were flying around.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Some kind of stink bug, possibly genus Brochymena. According to Kaufman's Field Guide to Insects of North America, that genus is made up of species that look like bark, and some of them hibernate under tree bark in the winter as adults, which would explain finding adults in the spring.

 This caterpillar's "I'm a twig!" routine would be more convincing if it was somewhere that it was logical for a twig to be, rather than jutting out from the garden shed...

 There, that's more like it!

The creeping myrtle flowers in the rock garden are not in full bloom all over yet, but they have been blooming in abundance in some sections for a while, so I have been disappointed at the lack of bees in the garden, but today there were suddenly bees, several different species. I got a picture of ONE (bees, as you know, are BUSY, and they did not have time to pose for me):

 Bumblebee

With the warm weather today this was the first evening that there were more than a couple bugs attracted to the porch light. They were mostly on the ceiling of the porch, so I couldn't get pictures, but...

Here's an ichneumon wasp.

There is a bike trail where we like to go for rides, and what I like about it is primarily that it is basically flat. It's hard to find a flat place to ride a bike in Connecticut, because it is a very hilly place, but I hate riding up hills, so I like this trail. Here's the thing about the trial, though: it's not really flat. It looks flat, and back before we had bikes we used to walk there, and I thought it was flat, but when you're riding a bike, you become acutely aware of even the slightest incline, which you probably wouldn't notice at all on foot. So once I got a bike, I found out that the trail is ever so slightly hilly. I was thinking about this today when I was trying to take pictures of spiders. There was a breeze today that was so light that I didn't even notice it until I was trying to take a picture of a spider on its web. Before that I would have said it was a still day, but the amount of wind required to make it difficult to take a picture of a spider on its web is, like the hills on the bike trail, barely even noticeable until...

Anyway, first let's get back to the subject of romance in Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I am pretty sure this is a male spider flirting with a female. It was crawling up this branch with its front legs like this...

 ... and at the top of the branch was this spider, watching. I am not 100% sure of what was going on here, because they looked very different, and because the one doing the flirting was bigger, and I have been under the impression that females are larger in spiders. But looking different isn't necessarily a sign that they are not the same species; in some species of spiders the sexual dimorphism is so pronounced that you would never guess that the males and females are at all related to the same species.

 I took this picture about half a second too late: the female jumped away. It was the most impressive jumping spider jump I have ever seen.

 When he got to the top and she was gone, he seemed very disappointed.

 

 So, I mentioned the breeze, and how hard it makes it to take pictures of spiders on their webs...

 This was a curious scene... This spider here had a pretty impressive meal in its grasp...

... and for some reason this small fly kept hanging around. It was much closer at some points, and I don't know what it was hanging around for. Obviously it's a pretty safe time to be near the spider, but what was it there for in the first place?

 This spider has caught a meal, too.

On the front porch, attracted to the porch light, or at least to the insects attracted to the porch light. This was a tiny spider, it's body about a millimeter long.