The Bugs in the Backyard: Flutterers

Considering how many bugs I saw today, and how many pictures I took, I am starting this too late to get it done on time, so I'm just going to cut to the chase...

Today, the backyard was aflutter with butterflies. One in particular is the one I have been looking for, and I have two parts of its life cycle for the Backyard Bug of the Day, but I am not going to call them Co-Bugs, because it's the same species of insect.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

The monarch butterfly caterpillar has hatched! I had to go out for an appointment first thing today, buy I checked on it and could see that it was ready to hatch. I didn't have time to take a picture of it, and I figured that I could do that when I got home, but by the time I got back a little over an hour later, the caterpillar had emerged. In case you're wondering, the way you can tell the egg is about to hatch is because it has darkened in color. More specifically, you can see the dark head of the caterpillar through the egg case. It's hard to tell from this picture, but monarch caterpillars eat their egg after they hatch.

Here's the other picture for Backyard Bug of the Day–an adult, female monarch butterfly! I could not find that she laid any eggs, but she did feed from milkweed all over the backyard. Either that or there were others, as well.

Here she is resting on some dead vines hanging off a tree.

The only shot I got of the dorsal side of her wings. They look pretty weathered.

As for the other butterflies, most of whom were also feeding on the milkweed flowers:

Eastern tiger swallowtail. I think male.

Eastern comma.

Great spangled frittilary

Some kind of skipper

Photobombed...

... by a flower beetle of some kind.

I also saw a cabbage white and I think there was a small wood satyr dancing around the backyard all afternoon.

There was a bit of a mystery on the back porch today:

There is a table on the back porch that we use for projects, and today I noticed that there was a lot of dried grass strewn on it, along with two dead bugs, a katydid nymph and a tree cricket nymph.

Later on I noticed that there was another katydid nymph, along with one on the floor. I thought they were all dead, but I poked this one and it moved a little bit. So I poked the others, and they were also alive, but not quite... right. I could not figure out what they were doing there, and along with all that dead grass.

I thought about what I know about insects, and looked up...

Hanging above the table is this wind chime, made of hollow metal tubes.

And here is the bee house that I hung up. Today I found that one of the tubes has a bunch of dried grass sticking out of it. So what I think happened is that some kind of bee or wasp made nests in the wind chime tubes. What some bees and wasps do is sting other insects and stash them in their nests/burrows to provide food for their larvae when they hatch. Often the insect prey is not dead, just stunned or paralyzed. So it is possible that the sluggish insects were stung, stashed up there as food for the bee/wasp larvae with the grass, and because the tubes are smooth and hanging upright, and move in the wind, everything fell out onto the table.

I saw several species of lady beetles today. This one is a 14-spotted lady beetle. (I didn't get pictures of the other species).

Some kind of hopper nymph. These are all over the backyard. I don't know what kind of hopper they grow up to be. I have noticed that they all started out white or pale colors, and are getting darker as they get bigger.

Gypsy moth chrysalis. This is the only gypsy moth of any form that I saw today (although, there were some moth flying around that may have been male adult gypsy moths).

Sawfly with some kind of prey.

I have been looking for these, red milkweed beetle. For some reason I have not seen any of the usual milkweed inhabitants this year, this one (well, I have seen it NOW), large and small milkweed bugs... Sorry I didn't get a better picture, but it didn't stick around for more.

Leaf hopper

Assassin bug nymph. It looks like the prey its proboscis is stuck into is a sawfly larva.

Moth

Fall webworm caterpillar

Buffalo tree hopper. There was a discarded exoskeleton on this same vine; I assume it recently belonged to this critter.

Caterpillar...

It found a piece of frass (probably its own, from when it was eating the leaf above this one) and picked up up and FLUNG it away.

When it was climbing back up the leaf there was something on the other side that I didn't notice at the time, but it appears to be an insect, and it's weird, and I wish I had seen it and gotten a close-up of it.