May Flowers

There are a lot of things blooming in my backyard right now, wildflowers, spring ephemerals, so I decided to to a photographic inventory of everything in bloom, and now I am going to share it with you, with bugs, where available.

Let's begin with a flower that was host to today's Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Moth on cinquefoil. If you know how small a cinquefoil flower is then you will know how small this moth is. If you don't know... well, the flower is about half an inch across.

Most of the flowers blooming right now are tiny...

 And maybe this is the point where I should mention that I don't know the names of a lot of these. When we first bought our property twenty years ago I bought a wild flower identification guide and identified every species of flower I found on the property, which I think was around 50 species? Or maybe that was the birds... Anyway, I have forgotten a lot of them now, and I got out of the habit of looking them up a long time ago. So... I don't know what these are, and I won't know most of the others.

Same as above, but with a bee.

 Bleeding heart. These are not growing wild, I planted this.

 Bluets

 Forget-me-nots

 Leafy spurge with ants

In quite an exciting moment, by coincidence on this day when I decided to document all of the flowers I could find blooming in my yard I happened to find a species that is new to me (and my yard):

 I have no idea what it is, but the gnats seem to like it.

 There is a smaller flowering crab apple, one that was planted by birds, that still has some blooms. Note the ant.

 Lily of the valley. With gnats.

 Dogwood. I generally keep my distance from these, because I am allergic.

 Wild strawberry

 Blueberry

 Violets

 Buttercup. Yellow is definitely the dominant color of the flowers in my backyard at the moment.

Dandelion with bee

 Also dandelion

 Wood anemone. These looked much better last week; now they are past their prime and there were only two rather bedraggled blooms left. If I had done this inventory last week there may have been a very different lineup, and I did it next week there are a few more things that would be in bloom... but this would not.

 Canada mayflower. Because it's May.

 You can't see it, but there's an ant on this one.

 There are still a few creeping myrtle blooms.

 Jack-in-the-pulpit

The other flowering crab apple, that is only blooming near the top of the tree.

And now for the rest of the bugs:

 This moth was on the side of the house when I went outside to get the mail, and normally I would go inside, get my camera, and come back out again to take a picture of it, but years of experience taught me that I didn't have to do that, so when I didn't make it outside to do my bug walk until well over an hour later, that was when I took a picture of this moth.

 Ants at work

 The enemy! This is what gypsy moth caterpillars look like early on. I am not sure if this is still the first instar, or the second. These three will not make it to their third.

 Sawfly

 Bee

 Winter firefly. I am not seeing so many of these nowadays.

 leaf hopper, or tree hopper, or... some kind of hopper

 Moth

 Lace bug

More dandelions with bees:

 Beetle

Arachnid Appreciation:
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There were two spiders underneath the rain gauge when I emptied it today, and I think they are different species:

Jumping spider

Mite. I think this is a velvet mite. Quite a large species of mite, as mites go.