insects – Brennah's Backyard

Clearwing Moths

A couple of unusual and interesting moths in my area are the closely related hummingbird and snowberry clearwing moths. Both fly during the daytime, and hover in front of flowers they visit in a way that resembles a hummingbird sipping nectar. They also (as their name implies) both have large clear patches on their wings.

When I first spotted one of these moths (years ago now) I identified it as a snowberry clearwing. After that I began to assume all the large, clear winged moths I saw were the snowberry clearwing, but recently, going through and trying to identify various things I’d photographed, I realized I couldn’t remember what the difference between the two species was. I looked them up again, and realized that I’ve actually seen and photographed both (and there are actually a couple more less common species I haven’t seen).

The most obvious difference between the two species is that the snowberry clearwing has a black stripe running through the white patch on the head and ‘chest’ that meets the front pair of legs, which are also black, while on the hummingbird clearwing that patch and the front pair of legs are all consistently white. There are some subtle differences in the wings of the two species, but otherwise, both show a fair amount of variety in their colors and markings.

Though I think I’ve seen the snowberry clearwing most often, the best pictures I’ve gotten yet are of the hummingbird clearwing. But whichever species they are, they’re always beautiful and fun to see.

Hummingbird clearwing foraging on bee balm

Snowberry clearwing on oregano flowers. This is one of my older photos but it shows the stripe quite well.

Mysterious Tiny Holes

I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to all the tiny holes in the sand around the seasonal pond area until little flickers of movement inside the holes caught my attention. (For some sense of scale in the photo, what looks like little pebbles are grains of sand.) They were only ever in my peripheral vision; whatever creature I was seeing was apparently very fast and skittish.

Unable to see properly what kept darting back into the holes, I eventually resorted to crouching over ones I’d seen recent movement in with my camera and holding very still… and waiting. I had to have my camera focused on the spot they would emerge before they came out as any tiny movement would cause them to disappear. After a bit of patience (and physical discomfort) I managed to get a couple clear shots of the heads of the creatures poking out of the hole… but they didn’t look like anything I recognized.

I thought they might be the immature form of some insect, but it took me quite a bit of searching before I managed to find something that looked similar… a tiger beetle larva! I don’t know how to tell what species of tiger beetle just from the head of the larvae, but it is quite likely that these were bronzed tiger beetle larvae, because I’d seen quite a few adults of that species in the same spot earlier that spring.

The other interesting thing about looking up pictures of the larvae was that I realized that it was just the head and thorax that is so well developed at this stage, and the rest of the body looks more grub-like. I had thought, looking at them in my pictures, that they looked like little ambush predators with those large mandibles (added to the fact that they didn’t ever seem to come all the way out of their burrows), and it turns out that’s exactly what they are. They pop out and grab passing insects (or other small animals), which is also why their front end is so much more developed at that stage. (The adults are predators too, but they chase down their prey.)

‘Very fast and skittish’ is also a pretty good description of adult tiger beetles, and this is usually the easiest angle to get of them… but I actually like how well it shows off the beetle’s markings!

Wasp Watching

The past year turned out to be a good one for getting wasp photos for me, particularly this past August. When the first of the goldenrod started to bloom these plants turned into magnets for pollinators of all sorts, but I particularly noticed a lot of wasps, not just in numbers of individuals, but in diversity of species as well.

Before that, wasps had been congregating on the spotted horse mint / spotted bee balm (both common names for monarda punctata) in the pollinator garden by the house. I was having fun seeing how many different kinds I could spot as well as just appreciating their many different shapes and colors… but as I realized going through them later, even some very similar looking ones turned out to be different species.

I wanted to show off in this post some of the wasp variety I’ve been able to photograph through the years, though of course what I’ve managed to photograph is just a tiny sampling of what exists (there are some truly wild looking wasps out there, of which I’ve managed to photograph only a few). Also some of these photos are ones I’m more satisfied with than others.

The northern paper wasp (polistes fuscatus) has a significant amount of variety packed into one species. Their varied colors and markings make them fun subjects, plus I was starting to notice what seemed to be the same individuals hanging out on the same flower patches each day when I was doing really regular wasp walks.

This is a type of oak gall wasp laying eggs in an oak bud. Oaks are hosts to an impressive number of gall wasps, as well as other gall making insects which is part of why oaks are considered such important members of their ecosystems.

five banded thynnid wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

The common name of this wasp is the gold-marked thread-waisted wasp (which sounds more like a description of the wasp than a name… but at least it’s an accurate description!) These are certainly interesting looking creatures, but I’m not particularly happy with most of the pictures of them I have so far. Fortunately they don’t seem to be a rare species so hopefully I’ll be able to get some better pictures at some point.

grass carrying wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

This tachytes wasp (a genus known as sand-loving or green-eyed wasps) was quite mesmerizing, with both the green eyes and silvery stripes on the wasp’s abdomen being very shiny and reflective. The stripes even seemed to change color depending on the angle and lighting. These were also fast moving wasps, which probably exaggerated the reflective characteristics and made the wasp seem to shimmer in the sun. It also made it that much trickier to get good photos…

The four-toothed mason wasp is a fairly common species, and I’ve photographed them before, but this particular little guy gave me the opportunity to get the best pictures I have of this species.

The same wasp (I have quite a few pictures of him).

bald faced hornet enjoying the goldenrod.

This wasp was so tiny you might assume it’s a fruit fly if you see one… and this isn’t even as tiny as wasps get!

Great black digger wasp on swamp milkweed.

This mason wasp (euodynerus crypticus) may not have a common name, and there doesn’t seem to be much information about them out there. What little I was able to find piqued my interest, though; apparently it may be a social wasp, which I hadn’t heard of in the mason wasp family before. In any case, this species was regularly visiting the spotted bee balm, so I got to see them regularly for a little while.

Some sort of ichneumon wasp on the back of my hand. I found this wasp halfway through December!

Many species of solitary wasps, like this rusty spider wasp, specialize in hunting a specific type of prey that they will cache in a nest for their offspring. In the case of spider wasps, they specialize (as their name implies) in hunting spiders. I noticed one of these wasps hanging around the entrance to the garage one day, and then she disappeared into the garage for a while and I lost track of her, only to later spot her dragging a huge spider out!

Black giant ichneumon wasp on a dead tree.

four-banded stink bug wasp excavating a nest in sand. This wasp is also named for what they specialize in hunting.

Great black digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

A close up of the black giant ichneumon wasp. These wasp are a challenge to photograph because they’re just so long. They don’t fit in the frame well.

Myzinum maculatum is another wasp that doesn’t seem to have a common name, but they are closely related to the other thynnid wasps in this post.

Common thread-waisted wasp. I think this wasp had an injured wing, sadly.

Great golden digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

Four banded stink bug wasp on flat-topped goldenrod.

I found this cuckoo wasp at a local park. When I’ve seen cuckoo wasps before they’ve been pretty skittish, so I was happy to finally find one that was cooperative!

This picture shows the cuckoo wasp (the same one from the previous picture) between my knuckles, which shows how small this one was.

I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of wasps I can find this year!

Last Aster Standing

Back in 2021 we started some native wildflowers from seeds. Since they are perennials they didn’t really fill out until the next year, though a few plants produced a scattering of flowers in their first year. One of of the species we planted was the aromatic aster. I chose it because it was supposed to be an especially late blooming and drought tolerant species (we’re mostly in a wetland, but had one dry area to plant) and by early November of last year it was the last aster still blooming. (To be fair, the most exuberantly blooming plant was in a favorable spot for soaking up late day warmth, and nicely mulched, which does help extend the growing season.) It was also one of the last few flowers blooming in general, so not surprisingly, it attracted the attention of all the remaining pollinators and concentrated them in a small patch of flowers. In particular, the asters were covered in bumble bees.

It was pretty easy to get some good pictures of the bumble bees since there were a whole bunch of them and they didn’t seem at all concerned about having a camera right next to them.

So many bees concentrated together in this patch sometimes led to bees foraging in close quarters…

These two got a little too close, and are trying to fend each other off here.

This little halictus bee also wasn’t too comfortable with having a big bumble bee wandering up behind him.

Another halictus bee resting on a flower. She hung out on this flower for quite a while.

There were a couple of drone flies hanging out in the midst of all the bees. Drone flies are a type of hover fly, also known as flower flies (and both names are quite accurate).

After the encounter with the bumble bee this halictus bee decided to groom himself and have a little rest, giving me a particularly good opportunity to take his portrait.

There were a few of these tiny, colorful agapostemon bees darting around. They’re tricky to photograph because they’re fast, but I noticed they would pause and rest every once and a while, so I managed to get a couple nice pictures of them.

Getting a Telephoto Lens (Part 1)

Relatively recently, I got a new type of lens for my camera. Previously, I had a macro lens and a pretty standard non-specialized type of lens. The new one is a telephoto lens, which is a type of lens that allows you to zoom in on distant subjects.

Rabbit lounging in the grass — A very relaxed rabbit.

A telephoto lens has very different uses and possibilities compared with a macro lens, but there is one thing about it that feels familiar; both lenses allow me to photograph things I can’t quite make out. I may be able to see them, but not clearly enough to tell what I’m looking at. Through the lens, I can see them with much more detail. (Sometimes I will just look through the lens like binoculars to see what that dark shape in the trees is.) So, what the macro lens does for tiny objects (or creatures), the telephoto lens does for distant objects (or creatures).

A male goldfinch perched on a spruce branch. This was taken shortly after I got the new lens.

So this new lens doesn’t make any of my previous lenses obsolete, it just opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities that weren’t there before. One of the main things I’d had in mind for it when I got it was to use it to photograph birds; a telephoto lens is pretty much a requirement for bird photography. The lens also works well for butterflies and presumably any other large, skittish insects, like dragonflies.

A monarch butterfly on New England aster flowers — A monarch butterfly foraging on New England aster flowers. It is possible to get a photo like this without a telephoto lens, but it would be a lot harder and more dependent on luck. (Most of my previous butterfly photos happened when a butterfly approached while I was photographing other pollinators.)

Another use for it I’ve found that’s less apparent is to be able to get a different angle on certain subjects, even though I can get close to them and I want a ‘close up’ of them…

Sunchoke flowers against dark background — This is a relatively close up picture of these sunchokes, but I took it from a ways away so that I could line the bright yellow flowers up with the dark backdrop of a clump of trees to the south, making for some sharp contrast. I had seen this contrast in previous years, but I wasn’t able to photograph it with the lenses I had at that point. Once I got the telephoto lens, I knew exactly what to do with it.

First Butterflies of Spring

There are a couple of fairly common woodland butterflies that I usually start to see right around this time of year: the comma butterfly and the mourning cloak butterfly. It should be a bit of a toss-up which I see first since they start to appear at roughly the same time. In practice, it seems like I usually spot the mourning cloak first. This year was no exception to that; I spotted my first mourning cloak on the 21st (I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, though), and I haven’t spotted a comma yet.

The two species are relatively closely related and have a similar strategy that allows them to be present super early in the spring; both overwinter as adults and can feed on tree sap so they aren’t dependent on flowers blooming to be active.

Mourning cloak butterfly — This mourning cloak butterfly was basking in a patch of sunshine in the woods which might be part of why I was able to creep up on it. Their distinctive colors and markings make them pretty unmistakable.

Comma butterfly on willow catkins — This comma butterfly is perched on one of its host plants (plants their caterpillars develop on), willow.

Wildlife Photography Requires Patience…

It occurred to me that in one of my last posts ‘Life in a Dead Tree’, I described the bees I found nesting in the tree, and included the best photo I’d managed to take of one of them, which wasn’t very good. I knew at the time that it wasn’t particularly good, but decided it was better than nothing. That didn’t stop me from trying to get a better one next time their nesting season came around. It took me over a month of attempting whenever the weather seemed good for bees to be active, but I finally managed to get the photos I was after. And some of my ‘failed’ attempts were actually kind of cool in their own right.

nest hole of an augochlora sweat bee with bee antennae poking out — At the time I took this picture, I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or disappointed that only the bee’s antennae were visible… I did not have a proper picture of these bees nesting yet, and the bee seemed to have no intention of coming out the rest of the way. It is kind of cute though, and now I can properly enjoy it knowing I eventually succeeded in photographing these bees.

nest hole of an augochlora sweat bee surrounded by wood dust — This is the nest of the bee I waited for for quite a while (in a not very comfortable position) to come out of her nest. All she ever did was poke her antennae out a bit. I spotted this nest thanks to all the ‘sawdust’ piled around the entrance from recent excavations. All you can really see of the bee in this photo is a tiny glint of green in the hole.

native bee excavating a nest in a log — This is not the species of bee I was after, but it was my first decent photo of a bee emerging from a nest in a log. It isn’t quite as sharp as my next set of pictures, but it does show the bee actively excavating her nest (you can see the chewed up wood in her mandibles) which I think is pretty cool.

Augochlora sweat bee at the entrance to her nest — My first clear shot of an augochlora bee exiting her nest!

Augochlora sweat bee on a mossy log — Another bee scoping out a log. I don’t know if she had a nest here, or if she was looking for a spot to build her nest, but she looked pretty next to the yellow-green moss. Her genus name, augochlora, actually translates to ‘gold-green’.

Life on a Dead Tree

There is a particular fallen tree in the woods that I visit frequently, because there is usually something interesting to see there. When it was still standing, I identified it as a wild cherry, and although I’ve seen others, this one was the largest.

wild black cherry tree (Prunus serotina) — The wild cherry tree when it was still standing

A while after the tree fell, I started to notice a lot of different mushrooms growing on it, and I started to make a habit of checking on it to see if there were any particularly photogenic mushrooms there while I was out taking pictures in the woods.

This spring while out in the woods taking pictures of the various wildflowers and trying to determine what kind of pollinators they were providing for, I noticed new interesting things happening with the downed cherry. At first I noticed the metallic green bees darting around the dark, scaly bark. Then I saw something green and shiny, but it wasn’t a bee…

A six-spotted tiger beetle (cicindela sexguttata)

Even though tiger beetles have a bit of a reputation for being hard to photograph, I found the little green sweat bees to be much more difficult, at least in the circumstances the fallen tree offered. They were attracted to the dead tree as a nesting site and I would see them darting around the wood, but almost anytime they landed, they would immediately disappear into the tiny holes in the wood that were the entrances to their nests.

I’m sure there are more creatures than just the ones I noticed making use of the dead tree as habitat, and I’ll continue to notice more as I keep on visiting the tree.

A toad that was sheltering under the bark of the tree

A seedling growing from a crack in the bark. I don’t know if this is a good place for this seedling to be growing, but I thought it was interesting.

Bee Hunt

I spent a large portion of the warmest day of the year thus far trying to find a particular bee. The bee I was looking for (colletes, probably colletes inaequalis) was one that I’d seen regularly in the spring and was often one of the first bees I’d find, but last year, I didn’t see any. I wasn’t sure if it was because they weren’t around, or if I just wasn’t looking at the right times. I did eventually spot some, but for some reason, they seem more skittish than I remember them being. Also complicating matters, the willows I was searching for them on have grown a bit too tall for me to see all the catkins well, and I noticed a hover fly with strangely similar coloration to these bees all over the willow catkins, making it hard to tell at a glance if the little flash of silver and black I was seeing should be followed. Makes me wonder if the flies are mimicking the colletes bees, though… they certainly look like they could be, but these bees aren’t exactly intimidating, so why mimic them specifically?

Hover fly (syrphid) on willow catkin — Hover fly on willow catkin

In the end, I found that some of the bees were visiting the flowering winter crops in the hoophouse and I managed to catch a couple on their way out. The bee in the picture pretty much flew into my hand and I took the opportunity to hang on to him just long enough to get my camera ready.

Mining bee (andrena) — And for one last look-alike, here is a mining bee (an andrena species) on a willow catkin.

Tiny Beetles

Here are some tiny rove beetles I found the other day that push the limits of my current macro lens. In the first three pictures you can kind of see how the wings are folded up under the elytra (the shell-like covering of the wings of beetles, which rove beetles have considerably less of than most other beetles). In the last two pictures the wings are completely unfolded. I know the wings are pretty thin, but it is still impressive to me that they can just fold up their wings and put them away.

rove beetle (staphylinidae) — Rove beetle perched on what is probably a sparrow dropping