Insect Noises

I don't know a lot about insect noises. Other than crickets and katydids, I don't know off the top of my head what other insects make noise (other than the buzzing sound of flying). Grasshoppers, maybe? Oh, cicadas, I know about those! The thing is, before I knew there was such a thing as a katydid, I think the only insect I knew about that had a song, or call, or whatever you wan to call it, was the cricket. And back then I thought there was only one kind of cricket. I mean, I only knew there was one kind of cricket, and it never occurred to me to wonder if there were others. There was just what I heard on summer nights. I don't know what I thought about whatever other noises I heard on summer nights, I haven't always been so observant, and I don't remember. Anyway, crickets. Field crickets are the ones I have always known about, and the thing about them is they will be chirping away outside, and you would think you could find them by following the sound, but they will stop making it when you get close. And by close that could mean anywhere within ten feet. You can't find an insect very well by sound from that distance, not if they are hiding under something on the ground. Today I was outside, and it wasn't even on my bug walk, but I heard a cricket as soon as I walked out. I thought about the fact that I would never be able to find it by its sound, other than to know it was in the rock garden, because I knew that it would stop singing as soon as I got close, and that is exactly what it did. And when it stopped... it was silent. This was very late in the afternoon, on the cusp of evening, and all of the neighborhood leaf blowers and lawn mowers had been silenced, and without the song of that one cricket, there was no sound at all. That is the season we're entering into now. (I will be happy when we are in that season between leaf blower season and snowblower season. It's very peaceful).

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Some kind of Hemiptera nymph. On the bud of one of the not-yet-blooming chrysanthemums.

Once again most of the insect action was on the flowering chrysanthemum. I can't wait for the other chrysanthemum plants to bloom, to see what happens then (they are a different variety):

 Hoverfly

 

 One sweat bee. The only bee on the blooms today.

A HUGE flower fly:

 

 It was kind of cooperative, so I took a lot of pictures of it, and I couldn't decide which was best, so you're getting more than I should give you.

There were mosquitoes, too:

This one is male, note the feathery antennae.

Female. Sleeker antennae.

Terrible shot, I know, but it shows the mosquito covered in pollen. And that is how pollination-by-insect works; the insect gets pollen all over it while sucking nectar from the flower, and then when it goes to another bloom to feed on its nectar it leaves some of that pollen behind, pollinating the flower.

There was a little bit of flower sharing today:

 

 Moth

 The first March fly of the season

 Ants

 Winter firefly. The other notable thing about this picture, other than the insect, is one that probably not many people would notice, but it's something I notice because this is what I do every day. The quality and angle of the light has changed as the season has changed.

Bristletail

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Even most of the spiders (Okay, 2 out of 3) that I saw today were on the chrysanthemums, but on the ones that are not blooming yet: