The Bugs in the Backyard: What's the Buzz?

If you plant it, they will come. If by it you mean pollen-bearing flowers and by they you mean pollinating insects. Obviously I hoped, and maybe expected, that insects would be attracted to the new flowers I bought, even though I have barely seen any pollinators for the last few weeks. Since nothing else is blooming anymore, and it had been so cold, I kind of expected that any of those kinds of insects were gone for the year. But I bought the new flowers anyway, and hoped something would show up. Still, I was in for a surprise today:

There were bees on the chrysanthemums (I should have bought flowers with a shorter name). Lots and lots of bees.

Several species of bees (mostly sweat bees, I think).

I wasn't 100% surprised to see bees there, even though I haven't seen any bees in weeks. While I was doing my physical therapy exercises in the morning I was lying down, looking up at the skylight, and I thought I saw a few bumblebees bumble past. It's hard to tell what kind of insects you're seeing that way, but they were big, and I thought they were bumblebeeish. I didn't see any on the flowers, but there were plenty of other bees (no honeybees either).

And one moth. I didn't get a better picture than this, but you can see it on the underside of the flower.

Mostly the bees got along and shared the flowers well. There was one that kept tackling other bees that tried to share its flower–I wish I had gotten a picture of that. But mostly they just ignored each other and kept feeding. There were gnats, too.

A hoverfly came by, too.

There was a beetle on the plant's foliage.

This is the point where I should mention that it was 72ºF when I went outside to do my bug walk today. No doubt that had something to do with the plethora of bees on the chrysanthemums, but still, there were a surprising number of them. I still have to wonder how they all happened to find these flowers. Where have they been for the last couple of weeks that I put these flowers out on Sunday and suddenly on Thursday they are covered with bees?

Yesterday I was going to mention in my blog that I hadn't seen a praying mantis all year. I would possibly have mentioned it today... if it was still true. Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

There is a big rock in my rock garden that is meant to be sort of a bench, and today there was a praying mantis sitting on it. The rock garden is probably a good place for a predatory insect to be, but I didn't see it catch anything (I did not point out all the bees on the chrysanthemums.

Praying mantises are pretty cool, but I have mixed feelings about them. For one thing, even though it is our state insect, it is an introduced predator. A long time ago they were brought here from Europe, and in recent years people have been importing them to control garden pests. It's never a good idea to import a predator from elsewhere. Yes, you can put a praying mantis in your garden, and it will eat up all the garden pests. But it doesn't discriminate in its menu, it will eat up all of the beneficial insects, too, and the benign ones. It will eat the caterpillars that are destroying your broccoli, but it will also eat the bees that pollinate your tomato plants, and the monarch butterfly that just wanders by. And when it has eaten all of the insects in your garden, it will leave the garden and go find insects elsewhere, again eating everything it can get its claws on, good or bad. And it might also eat a hummingbird or two. Or a snake, which maybe sounds good to you, but snakes are beneficial predators that keep down populations of things like the mice that want to invade your house. I think that the reason it is our state insect is because it was part of a class project for some elementary school class to try to get legislation passed, and they chose it because it's cool, without actually considering whether an introduced predator was a good representation. But then, I didn't agree with the cookie they tried to get made into our official state cookie, either.

You can really tell when a praying mantis is looking at you.

Eventually it left the rock–it jumped off, and not in a cool, graceful, grasshopper-leap kind of way. More like a four year old belly flopping off the diving board kind of way.

It climbed up into this bush, and it looked a bit like it had a particular destination in mind, but in the end I don't think it did. I stopped watching it eventually, I had to look for more bugs, and when I came by again about forty-five minutes later I couldn't find it.

It's not a graceful climber, either.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

I think this is a winged ant. I think they grow wings to swarm when their population in the formicary gets too crowded, and a queen takes off with a bunch of followers to go start a new colony. But don't take that as fact, I am not sure that's how it works. Anyway, I only saw the one, not a whole swarm.

The rock garden was the place I saw most of the insects today. In addition to all of the bees (because that's where the chrysanthemums were), the praying mantis, and the winged ant, there were lots of other ants, crickets that I could hear but not see, ladybeetles crawling all over the walls of the house, at least 4 species of wasps... and...

Grasshoppers.

One of the wasps

Another wasp

This beetle wasn't in the rock garden, but on the driveway next to it. And it also may have been dead. It's hard to tell with beetles, they pretend to be dead to make you go away and stop bothering them.

This cocoon was dangling on the side of the foundation of the house. It looks like either whatever was inside crawled out, or something broke in to eat what was inside.

For a minute during my bug walk I thought it had started raining, because it sounded like rain drops were falling around me, but soon I realized it was something dropping from the trees: