People joke a lot about the ephemeral nature of spring. Depending on how cynical they are, spring lasts, a day, an hour, twenty minutes, blink-and-you-miss it. It definitely seems sometimes that after a long winter you have one really pleasant day and then all of a sudden it's summer, hot and humid. Although, around here spring arrives tentatively, a nice day followed by a week of chill, then a pleasant afternoon followed by a snowy day. But that's just the weather; if you look at the life emerging spring is a progression. And that includes spring ephemerals, flowering plants that bloom in the spring for a short time. I don't know if things like daffodils and crocus count, since they are not native plants, but this week (yesterday, in fact), one of my favorite spring signs of spring, a spring ephemeral, appeared in my yard:
Bluets
The first daffodil bloomed yesterday, too. I checked these flowers, as I have checked all of the flowers that have bloomed so far this spring, for bugs, but they have been woefully bereft of insects.
The freeze earlier this week killed my crocuses, but this wilted flower had a tiny insect inside it today, I was happy to find.
And finally, FINALLY, after the creeping myrtle in the rock garden has been in bloom for weeks, my vigilant search for bees has been rewarded!
Yesterday there was a small bee on the side of the house by the rock garden, that flew away when I tried to take its picture, but for a while now I have been waiting for, and expecting to find bumblebees in the rock garden. With so many flowers in bloom, the rock garden in early spring is usually buzzing with bumblebees. Today one finally arrived.
The forsythia also bloomed yesterday, and though I could not find any bugs on the bush yesterday, there were quite a few today:
When I spotted this and took this picture I thought this was a beetle, but as I look at it now I think it is a sawfly.
Several of the flowers had these little bugs in them.
There are more flowers in bloom than you might first notice, because to see most of them you would have to look up:
A few trees are in bloom, but wind-pollinated trees don't have showy flowers. In fact, for most of my life I don't think I realized that they had flowers. I thought that the colors on them in early spring were just leaves opening up. Now that I know so much more about nature (acknowledging that in the grand scheme of things I know practically nothing), it seems silly that I didn't realize it, but there you have it. I am silly, trees are very tall, many of them have flowers that are very small, and I did not take AP Bio in high school (nor did I take any plant biology classes in college. I took geology, and learned about septic systems). These are the kinds of flowers that are the cause of your misery if you have seasonal allergies in the spring. But I, an allergy sufferer, love them all the same, and it thrills me to see them waking up in the spring.
And the flowering crab apple is opening its leaves!
Hello leaves! I am so happy to see you!
I didn't intend to do a full bug walk today, but once I found a few bugs on the forsythia I could not resist. I went on a different path than I usually do, venturing a bit into the woods and back around through the field, and on one particular long, straight wide path, found something interesting. Backyard Bugs of the Day:
I came upon a huge swarm of some kind of insect along a wall by the path. I have never seen a swarm of insects this big in my yard. It stretched along the wall for about thirty feet (and I later found out there was another swarm, not as large, at the other end of the wall, about 100 feet away). Unlike the winter crane fly swarms, these insects did not land when I came close, they just shifted away a bit. They were so small, and flying so fast, that I could not tell what they were, but they seem to be some kind of gnats. I couldn't get close enough to really see them. At one point while I was watching them a gust of wind swept them away, but they must have liked the location because they swarmed back when the gust exhausted itself.
Zoomed-in look
More bugs:
There were little flies all along the front walk, but this one on the picnic table was easier to photograph.
Ant and snow flea
Candy striped leaf hopper on the tree where I usually find them on sunny winter (or spring!) days.
I thought this was a wasp when I first spotted it, but looking more closely through the camera I wonder if it might be an ant queen.
This is a tree where snow fleas are likely to be found when the weather suits them:
Arachnid Appreciation:
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