Blooms to Come

I'm not a smiley person by nature, and lately I haven't felt like there was much to smile about, but today, out in my backyard in the chilly, dreary weather, I found myself smiling. Why? Because of this:

 The flowering crab apple is just beginning to bloom, and it is covered with copious numbers of buds. This makes me happy because last year it didn't flower very well, and I thought that it was dying. It has rebounded this year, and soon will be a mass of pink blooms. That will attract a lot of bees, I hope, and other insects, too, but it will be lovely all on its own, regardless of the opinion of a lot of bugs.

 The peach tree is blooming too, but it only has about a dozen flowers, about all it ever has.

This wiped the smile right off my face, alas:

More of the enemy emerge–gypsy moth caterpillars.

But then there's this to smile about:

The robins have reoccupied their nest from last year, and the female is incubating her four eggs. This means we can't use the front door for the next couple of weeks.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I am pretty sure this is a springtail, and a new species for me. It is quite big for a springtail, but it definitely looks like one, and they do vary in size.

 It's tiny, but huge for a springtail. It's all relative.

 I've never seen one with this pattern.

The candy striped leaf hoppers have left the tree where they like to hang out in the winter, and have moved to trees that have leaves unfurling:

 

 Fly

I saw only one bee today:

 Bumblebee in the rock garden

 Beetle

 Cocoon

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 An interesting and timely find: yesterday I re-read my very first blog post, from 5 years and a day ago now, and I posted pictures of two spiders. When I saw this spider today I might have thought it was one I have not seen before, except that I realized that it is the same species of spider that I saw five years ago yesterday. The pictures are practically identical.

Five Years of Bugs

As of today, I have been writing this blog for 5 years. So... Happy Anniversary! I looked back at my first post, and apparently I didn't see many bugs that day. Weird that I chose to start the blog on a day when I didn't really have anything to post. I have no idea what was going through my mind, other than I was nervous about starting a blog. Today was a much buggier day in my backyard (although not a particularly buggy day), I am happy to say, so I have more to show you than I did five years ago on this date.

But before I show you the bugs I will share another thing I noticed in my backyard today. But first... some background. We bought our backyard twenty years ago (as of this past January); it wasn't a backyard then, because there was no house on it. It was just... a yard. Anyway, we hung out here a lot during the months and years between buying the land and building a house on it because we lived in an apartment, so we didn't have a yard where we were living. We did some work, clearing the lot for building the house, cutting down more trees than we should have, clearing out invasive species (which grew back, of course, and which we are still battling), building the stone steps out front, but a lot of the time we just hung out here, having picnics, enjoying nature. That April was a typical April in that the weather was weird. We have this concept of "normal" temperatures, which just means a 30 year average, but in April, regardless of what is normal, you can have snow, or you can have a sweltering hot day of 90ºF. The latter is what we had that April–not every day, but we had a few days of that during spring break week. This was our first spring with a yard, and we decided that the best thing to do in that sudden heat wave was to go buy a hammock so we could relax in our yard. We had a hard time finding a hammock to buy, because April isn't usually hammock season around here, but we finally found one after visiting several stores, bought the hardware we needed to hang it, had a lengthy debate about which two trees were the best for stringing a hammock between, and finally got our hammock up. We clambered into it and realized something–an absolutely vital ingredient for resting in the shade during a heat wave was missing: shade. There is no shade in April, because the trees don't have leaves on them yet. And it turns out that relaxing in a hammock in the blazing sun isn't all that pleasant. It was a bittersweet moment. Anyway, the thing I noticed in my backyard today was... shade. Being April, there isn't much of it, but one of the flowering crab apple trees is leafed out now, and in that one spot in my backyard, there is shade. Today wasn't warm enough that shade was needed, but for some reason it made me happy that it was there. The place where the hammock goes, though, is not yet shady at all.

The flowering crab apples are just beginning to bloom:

 

 Soon it will be a bee bonanza.

I didn't have to go outside today to find the Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 Beetle. I haven't looked it up. Consider that a nod to the beginnings of this blog when I hardly ever looked anything up and knew practically nothing about bugs.

 Whatever this is, there were quite a few of them in the rock garden today, flitting around.

The lack of blog posts for the last few days was related to weather and time constrictions. It was cold and wet, and I wasn't home most of the time. Today was warmer and sunny, and, well, I spent more than an hour walking around my backyard. I didn't find a lot of bugs (other than a lot of bees skimming the leaf litter), so mostly it was just time spent enjoying the loveliness. But there were some bugs (representing five orders: Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, and Diptera):

 Beetle in a bluet

 Bee in a bluet

 Ant and gnat on leafy spurge.

 Stilt-legged bug and gnat on leafy spurge

 Assassin bug nymph on flowering crab apple

 Moth

 Weevil

 I have mentioned that winter fireflies are diurnal, and have no light organs. Well, here's a pretty good shot showing the lack of said organs.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 Some kind of bee.

 

 Spring azure butterfly

Arachnid Appreciation:
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The spider is the one on the right, the gnat in its web the one on the left.

Contradictions

Today my backyard chose to make me look foolish by contradicting two statements I made in my blog yesterday. Well, not exactly contradicting them. I never said that I never find new bugs anymore. I said I hardly ever find them.

So, I found one today. And you now know from what I said yesterday that it will be Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I am not positive that this is a new bug, because there are too many now for me to remember them all, and I have never kept the kind of records that would let me look it up. When I started, I never realized that I would still be doing this years later. But this looks new to me, so that's enough for me. I don't know what it is, other than a tiny Hemiptera. It's one of those little things that you have to look closer at once you've spotted it, just to see if it even is a bug. Well, it is.

I also said yesterday that it is hard to get a good picture of a six-spotted tiger beetle:

Well, yesterday's was better anyway, though this one is in my backyard. And it wouldn't have been chosen for BBotD because I found that new bug. So... no regrets.

Once again I got pictures of half of the species of butterflies I saw today, which amounts to one butterfly:

 Spring azure, female. It's rare that I get a shot at the dorsal side of the wings, so this is pretty nice, even though it's not a great shot. I couldn't get closer, in part because butterflies are shy, and in part because the thorns on the plant stopped me.

 Crane fly. Female.

 Ovipositor close-up

There were bees and wasps all over today, mostly small bees skimming above the leaf litter in the woods. I don't know what kind they were, or what they were looking for there. There were many in the rock garden, too, attracted by the creeping myrtle flowers:

 and the dandelions are a draw, of course.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Jumping spider

Bug Rules

I have rules for this blog, that I try very hard to follow, even though following rules is not a hallmark of my character. The rules relate to the pictures I post: they have to be from the day of the post, they have to be taken by me, and most importantly, since this is a blog about my backyard and the bugs (and other life) in it, the pictures have to be taken in my yard. They don't have to be from the backyard, just within the boundaries of my property. And there are guidelines I sort of follow regarding what insects get to be Backyard Bug of the Day. First, they just have to be an insect, they don't have to be a "bug," which I discovered some time after I started my Backyard Bug of the Day project, refers specifically to insects of the order Hemiptera. I like the alliteration of Backyard Bug of the Day; Backyard Insect of the Day is not as catchy. So, it has to be an insect. As it is, I am leaving out spiders, which is too bad, because some of the spiders around here are awesome, but given the arachnophobia of some of the people that follow the Backyard Bug of the Day, and the fact that I already knew that spiders are not insects, and therefore not bugs before I knew what a bug really was... well, let's just say that spiders don't qualify. Sorry, spiders. For a pretty long time I had a rule that an insect could only be BBotD once, but after about 2 years of the project I got to the point where I was not finding something new every day (which is a pretty impressively long time, even when you consider that back then I didn't do this in the winter), so I decided that there is a yearly cycle, and a species can be reconsidered every year. Anyway, the guidelines now pretty much give any new insect priority to be Backyard Bug of the Day, but I don't find new things very often anymore. I've never counted, or even come close to identifying them all, but I know there must be somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 insect species that I have photographed in my backyard. In the absence of something new every day, I have to just choose which insect I found on that day to feature. I like it to be something I have just found for the first time that season, but at this time of year that can be most of the bugs I see on any given day. And mostly it has to be something that I got a good picture of. Unless I have a bad picture of something I have never seen before, a good picture is almost the most important factor. Particularly if it is a good picture of a bug that I have a hard time photographing. Because some bugs are just really, really hard to photograph. I mean, most of them are something of a challenge, but some of them are just really difficult. Uncooperative. And in some cases those difficult species are also gorgeous. So to get a good picture of one is a major coup.

All of this brings me to my dilemma today. The six-spotted tiger beetle is a gorgeous insect with a quirky personality, and it's pretty hard to photograph. It has some fairly predictable behavior, which usually includes not letting me get close enough for a picture, but also that if you see one, and you get to close and it flies away, chances are it may come back after a few seconds, or a minute or so. And they have favorite hang-outs, certain rocks, especially, where I will see them repeatedly over the course of a few days. Generally the same rocks each year. But knowing they might be seen there, and knowing that they might come back after I have scared them away does not negate their other personality quirk, the one that is their reluctance to sit still for a picture. So, when I DO get close enough for a good shot, the six-spotted tiger beetle is almost guaranteed to be awarded the honor of Backyard Bug of the Day (an honor that means absolutely nothing to any insect, even though I try to coerce them to cooperate by telling them they could achieve that. Yes, I talk to bugs. Trust me, that is not the weirdest thing about me). Anyway, today I saw a six-spotted tiger beetle (two, actually, but more on that anon), and amazingly it let me get really close to it, and I got a really good picture of that gorgeous insect. I took it the picture, I took it today, but... technically, the bug was not in my backyard. Or on my property at all. It was in the street in front of my house. It was about a foot away from the curb. So... it doesn't qualify for Backyard Bug of the Day under my own rules. Now, anyone who really knows me probably doesn't understand why this is a problem, because as I mentioned, I am not a huge fan of following rules (I mean, I follow important ones), but these are MY rules. What is even the POINT of me having rules for myself if I don't follow them? I am the only person to whom these rules apply. If I don't follow them, well, then this blog is just chaos. Which is not to say I haven't broken them. Maybe three times in the last 5 years (I think I have been doing this for almost 5 years). And always with good reasons. So... I do have other bugs I could choose today, and it's not like I have never seen a six-spotted tiger beetle before, but... well... Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Six-spotted tiger beetle. Here's my justification for choosing it: the beetle was not on my property when I took the picture, but I was–I had one foot in the street, but the other was in my yard. And after I took this picture, the beetle flew away... into my yard. Then later I checked one of the rocks in my backyard that the tiger beetles favor, and I did see one... which flew away before I could get close enough for a picture, and then didn't come back. Also, this really is the best picture I took today.

If you were to go only by what you see on this blog you would think that I haven't seen any butterflies yet this spring, but that is not the case. I have seen at least one every day this week. Sometimes they fly right by my face. I just haven't been able to get pictures of them, because they have been acting like butterflies. I actually saw two species today. But this is the best picture I could get:

 I think this is a spring azure. The other one I saw was either a comma or a question mark, but I didn't get close enough to see.

This was another candidate for BBotD, or so I thought when I took the pictures, but they didn't come out well, so...

 Beetle

 I've started taking my camera with me when I go out to get the mail, in case I see an interesting bug, and today I saw this, which I think is a rove beetle.

 Assassin bug

Today on the leafy spurge, tiny beetles, a tinier wasp, and an ant

The dandelions are blooming, and attracting bees, which is the reason why you should let dandelions grow in your lawn. They provide food for pollinators, and later in the summer the pollinators will provide food for you.

Click beetle

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Crab spider

 This bowl-and-doily spider has had a web in the same spot for the last couple of weeks.

 I have seen two caterpillars this week, both being eaten by predators. This one fell prey to a jumping spider.

At first glance this looked just like buds on a branch...

 Then I realized it was a bud, a spider, and a wasp.

 It looks like maybe the spider has a parasite?

I am still hoping one day for a tortoise, but for now... I saw my first snake of the year for Backyard Reptile of the Day:
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 It seemed very unconcerned about my presence. It poked around in the leaf litter. I would guess it smelled something and was hunting for it.