The Upside

Today was not a beautiful day in the backyard, but the backyard is beautiful, so I almost always enjoy being there, and I took my sweet time on a largely unsuccessful bug walk just because I love my backyard. I am enamored of how green it is now. Who cares that it was cold, wet, and gloomy? Especially when that wet weather might do in the gypsy moth caterpillars? I sound so bloodthirsty, or like I am wallowing in schadenfreude, but I can't help it. It's not like I LIKE the gloomy weather, I'm just saying it has an upside.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Moth. It was smaller than it probably looks here, about half an inch long.

I took a lot of pictures today, but very few of them came out, so I don't have much to show you, sorry.

 The sawfly larvae have gotten slightly bigger.

 Here's the problem with using the internet to find out what things are. Say you want to know what a gypsy moth caterpillar looks like (which I do, but mostly in the later instars). You can do an image search, but when I do that I see a LOT of caterpillars that I already know are not gypsy moths. So it casts doubt upon the veracity of the other iffy pictures: are they gypsy moths, or were they posted and identified by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about? I don't know what this is...

I have been wondering how bees get nectar from bleeding heart flowers, which dangle upside-down. Now I know.

Insect eggs–beetles, maybe?

They haven't hatched yet.

Larva of some kind, sawfly, I think. You can tell it is not a caterpillar, but some other kind of larva, because it has too many prolegs to be a caterpillar. I can't remember the exact number of pairs caterpillars have, 5, I think, but this has more.


There were a LOT of spiders in the backyard today, of a variety of species. Here are the ones that came out with half-way decent pictures for Arachnid Appreciation:
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I found two of these, hiding between leaves that they had stuck together with silk (not together, these were on different trees):