Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Close to Home

I don't know why I did a bug walk around my entire backyard today; most of the bugs I saw were within three feet of the house.

Backyard Bug of the Day:
 Stinkbug nymph on autumn joy sedum

Also near the house:
 Bumblebee and honeybee on autumn joy sedum. It continues to attract many of both. I am surprised that I am not seeing sweat bees there, though.


 Woolly bear caterpillar, just at the bottom of the back porch steps on the wheel of the grill

 Moth on the side of the house

 Sweat bee. The background is the side of the house.

Caterpillar, near the house. I think this is a new species for me, so it should be Backyard Bug of the Day but I don't think the pictures are good enough.


The weird thing is still there. In the rock garden, near the house.

Red-legged grasshopper, in the rock garden, near the house

Katydid, on the side of the house

Stinkbug, on hazelnuts, near the house.

Bugs that were not near the house, and therefore justified my bug walk (though some of these were within about 20 feet of the house):
 Cricket

This is going to be kind of gross:
 Today the contracted datana caterpillars were starting to spread out along the branch where they were huddled up yesterday, with some of them eating leaves and some wandering along the branch. A lot of them were... I guess the word is regurgitating dark liquid. Mostly a brown or black liquid, some green. You can barely see it on this one's face, but you can see it on the edge of the leaf.


 You can see it on the one on the lower right, but several of the others here were doing it, too. They were also doing a sort of synchronized twitching.

 Walking and posing along the branch


 
 This one is leaning back, and has two dark droplets on its head.

 One with a drop of dark, the other with a drop of green. A friend suggested that maybe it's tannin, from the oak leaves, but I don't know why they would be spitting it up instead of it coming out the other end. It is puzzling.

 Skipper

Hoppers tended by ants:
 Possibly tree hoppers of the species Publilia concava.

 Some are adults, some are still nymphs.

 Wasp dragging a fly

 Stinkbug

 Stinkbug. That's four species of stinkbugs today, counting the Backyard Bug of the Day, and assuming that it is not one of the other shown species, which I can't tell when it's a nymph.

 Galls. Galls are plant growths that occur when an insect (I think it's mostly wasps) plants and egg inside the plant, and the plant then makes the gall around the egg. The insect hatches and grows up inside the gall. There are many kinds of galls, but these are among the coolest looking I have seen.

 Banded tussock moth caterpillars

 Tree cricket

 There were four of these squash bugs/leaf footed bugs walking up and down the trunk of this tree.

Banded tussock moth caterpillar that has just molted

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Funnel web spider in the rock garden, so, near the house

Nursery web spider

As a side note, there was a nursery web spider that I saw the last two days, on the same leaf of a pokeweed plant, and I looked for it again today, but not only was the spider gone, the leaf was gone, along with many of the other leaves near it. I think a deer must have eaten them; this was too much for it to have been herbivorous insects, particularly when I didn't see any on the plant yesterday or today.




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