I think it's fun when there are flowers that are blooming that attract a lot of different kinds of bugs, and there will be several different species on the same plant, all feeding together. I don't mean situations like the rock garden, which has a lot of flowers over a large area, and there are lots of bees and other insects feeding in that area. I mean smaller scale plants, with a dense population of diverse insects feeding together. Like this:
The leafy spurge has been blooming for a while, and I have been surprised at the lack of insects on the flowers. Usually they are covered with ants, and tiny beetles, and other insects, but before today they have been unoccupied. So here is an ant, a stilt-legged bug, and you can't really see it, but there's a tiny beetle on this plant, too.
And there were more insects on the leafy spurge, too:
That dark, round thing on the right is another beetle.
More than one species of ant feeds on these.
Bees like them, too. And even more beetles.
Backyard Bug of the Day:
Weevil. This was right next to the front door. I didn't find it on my bug walk, I found it when I was coming in with the mail, and I had brought my camera out with me, just in case I saw any bugs. I saw a lot of them, mostly bees and sawflies, but none would sit still for pictures. And then I found this.
Later, when I did my bug walk, the bees were still zooming around too fast for me to get pictures of them, except for two of them:
This one was snoozing on the side of the house.
This one crawled out from under a leaf in the rock garden.
It's amazing to think that a couple of days ago I did a bug walk and didn't find any bugs, because today there were so very many of them. What you're seeing here today is only a fraction; most of them were flying around, so I couldn't get pictures. But there were plenty to photograph, too:
Snow fleas, on a tree trunk
The flowers on the pussywillow are all too high up to take pictures of them, but I got a few shots of them:
An assassin bug of some kind, I think. And why are there predators on this plant?
Because there are many things to prey on. Bees, mostly very small ones, flit around the flowers in impressive numbers.
Wasp
Winter fireflies:
I spotted this pair just connecting, and meant to go back later to see if they had switched to a position like the pair above, but I forgot.
Love is in the air for insects lately:
Crane flies. The female is the one above, you can see the pointy ovipositor.
There were a lot of click beetles around today.
So many insects today I could get more than one species at a time in a picture. Crane fly and ichneumon wasp.
In such situations you have to decide which one you want a close-up of,
because invariably you will scare away the other one when you get
close.
Beetle
Moth
The dreaded gypsy moth caterpillar.
Arachnid Appreciation:
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Spider with prey. As I was taking pictures of this, a small insect flew in and kind of bounced off the web, and I thought about how spiders should be grateful to me, because sometimes when I am taking pictures of them on their webs, the gnats that are buzzing around me end up getting caught, and so I am providing food for them. Just as I thought that...
... another tiny insect landed in the web and the spider zoomed up to capture and incapacitate it.
Spiders produce different kinds of silk for different situations, and when they are wrapping prey they don't just make a single strand, they produce many strands at once, which you can see if you look closely at this shot.
After it wrapped up the new prey, it went back to feed on the original one:
A couple of weeks ago I posted pictures of a lot of jumping spiders that I saw one day in my backyard, and I don't know if I pointed it out, but they were all on human structures: the side of the house, the picnic table, the garden hose, the lawn chairs. Now I am starting to see them out in the yard, in a natural setting.
At first I thought there were just tiny twigs sticking out of this vine, but I looked more closely...
Crab spider
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