Early Bugs

I did my bug walk at 7:30 in the morning today, mostly because it was in the upper 70s at 7:30 and it was supposed to be 99ºF in the afternoon, and there was NO WAY I was going to walk around my backyard in those conditions. Even if it would not be painfully grotesque to do so, I have asthma, and there was a poor air quality warning for today. I have, on rare occasions, done my bug walk at such an early hour, and I hardly ever find much, so I wasn't expecting to find much today (not that I would have found much later, when it was 99ºF, because the bugs don't like it that hot, either), but I actually did find quite a lot of bugs. It occurred to me that I think the other times I have done early morning bug walks it was probably during seasons when it's quite chilly in the morning. Whereas today, at 7:30 a.m., it was quite warm. Definitely a temperature conducive to bug activity. (Tomorrow is also supposed to be super hot, and I am not doing a bug walk at 7:30 again, so there may not be a blog tomorrow).

Here's what happens, though, when you take a camera from inside a nice, cool house outside where it's warm and humid:

 Your lens fogs up.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 I saw this tiny thing hovering over the black-eyed Susan patch, and I could not tell what it was, but the hovering made it possible to get pictures of it in flight, so I got a few (which are foggy, because of the lens). I figured that I would be able to figure out what it was by looking at the pictures, but not really...

 It definitely seems to be some kind of fly, from those eyes, but the legs are puzzling. I never saw it land anywhere, just hover and then fly away.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

Just yesterday I was feeling rueful that there are no primroses in my backyard this year, because that meant I would not see any primrose moths, and then today I found one primrose, which just happened to have a primrose moth in it.

The patch of black-eyed Susans was really popular again:

 Assassin bug nymph that has caught some prey

Lots of hoverflies around again.

Do you remember that yesterday I posted a picture of a monarch butterfly egg, and I said that I didn't think it had just been laid by the butterfly I had just seen, because it looked to me more like it was an egg almost ready to hatch? I think I might even have said it would hatch today?

 It has hatched.

I could only find one of the other monarch caterpillars today.

Another female monarch butterfly was spotted (by my husband) on the milkweed patch, but she was definitely feeding on flowers rather than laying eggs.

 Moth

 Ah, I recognize this tiny thing!

 It was Backyard Bug of the Day one day this week.

 Some kind of Hemiptera. It would have been BBotD if I had gotten a better picture.

 Moth

 Scorpionfly

 Fly on milkweed

Tiny moth and ant on milkweed

 We went to a baseball game tonight, and the field lights attracted some big moths, that were flying around near the spectators at times. When we got home, I was just in the act of complaining that there were so many big moths at the baseball game and I didn't see why I couldn't find big moths in my backyard, when I walked around the side of the house to the back porch and saw this:

 It's not in the same league as a luna, polyphemus, or cecreopia moth, but it was big.

For some reason the back porch light doesn't attract many bugs, unlike the front porch light, but tonight there were a million of them, mostly tiny things that were flitting around. There were moths, beetles, hoppers, a green lacewing... so many bugs.