The Bugs in the Backyard: 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):