The Bugs in the Backyard: Home to Blooms

Hi there! I'm back! I've been on vacation, visiting family, seeing a lot of nice bugs, mostly butterflies and dragonflies. I missed my backyard, and my backyard bugs. It's fun, though, to go away for a while and come back to be surprised at how much the backyard has changed in two weeks. Those same changes would have been almost too gradual to notice if I had been here all along, but coming home and finding a massive patch of black-eyed Susans in full bloom was a surprise:

This is but a portion of the patch.

I am sure you can guess where I saw most of the bugs in my backyard today. This patch of flowers was so popular with insects that there are 5 in this picture, four of which I didn't notice when I took the picture (I was just trying to get a shot of the flowers. It's almost impossible to take a picture of flowers in my backyard without bugs).

The long-legged fly on the left I could see while I was taking the picture. The others (all out of focus because I was not trying to take their picture), I did not notice, including the plume moth on the upper right, which is ironic because I kept looking for a plume moth, knowing they like black-eyed Susans, and didn't find one.

So, here's who I did see on the black-eyed Susan patch:

Looper caterpillars. There are two here.

One.

Two.

Later on they were closer together.

There were lots of loopers, actually, of different species:

I'm not sure, but I think that's a thrips there.

Tiny wasp

Beetle

Not on the black-eyed Susans, but on a daisy fleabane among them, an assassin bug nymph

Leaf hopper nymph

Some kind of plant bug

Leaf hopper

Katydid nymphs

There were two of them.

Hopper

A pair of flies

So many orders attracted to the black-eyes Susans: Lepidoptera, Orthoptera, Hemiptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is a species of tachinid fly.

Besides the black-eyed Susans, there is another plant that flourished in the time I was away, the milkweed. It appears that the flowers are past their peak, but the plants are very robust at the moment in general:

Sadly, looking so good is in part because there is no leaf damage from monarch caterpillars. I couldn't find any, nor any sign of them–like leaf damage, or frass. I saw no monarch eggs, either. I have yet to see a monarch butterfly in my backyard this year. I did see a lot of butterflies this afternoon, but not while I had my camera outside. I did my bug walk early in the evening, because I am a bit sunburned and I didn't want to be out in the sunburning time of day, and by evening it was pretty overcast, and the butterflies had gone away. I think most of what I saw were little wood satyrs. There were a lot of bees in the afternoon, too (I did spend a couple of minutes out there), but they were also mostly gone by evening. In general there were not many bugs on the milkweed, which is kind of strange. They are usually a very popular flower, with several species specific to the plant.

I did see a couple of caterpillars on milkweed:

I can't remember the name of this one, even though it was Backyard Bug of the Day a couple of weeks ago.

Yet another looper. They were all over the backyard today.

Although I did not find monarch eggs on the milkweed, I did find other insect eggs:

I think this is the same species as above, but slightly further along.

I still have not figured out what these are, but they are all over the backyard, more mature than they were before I left on my trip, and this one was on milkweed.

Other Bugs:

Quite a lot of caterpillars around today, including a couple of these, brown hooded owlet moth caterpillars. They are somewhere in the middle of their caterpillar phase, and don't have all of their colors yet.

Thorn mimic plant hopper

Crane fly

Weevil

Nymph of some kind

I think this is a spider egg case, inside a nut shell.

Looper

I don't know what this is, but it definitely has a larval aspect to it.

Aphids

There was a young rabbit that did not seem to mind me standing close to it, taking pictures. It appeared to have several ticks stuck to its neck.

Hopper nymph

Caterpillar

I think this is a cuckoo wasp, but it appeared to be a zombie. It was very sluggish, anyway, but it was a warm evening.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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