insects – Brennah's Backyard

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

Midwinter Hive Check

This past Sunday was very warm for this time of year and I decided to check on my bees and see how they were doing. I wanted to see if it looked like they had enough honey left to make it until spring, and make sure that it would be accessible to them. Sometimes, as the cluster of bees makes its way slowly through their winter provisions, they find themselves with empty combs between themselves and the combs filled with honey. They can’t cross the barrier to get to the honey, because the cluster itself moves very slowly (especially when raising brood), and individual bees would quickly become immobilized by the cold.

This is the first time I have done a midwinter hive check, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The sun was shining, but it was windy, and the wind was chilly. I knew the bees wouldn’t like that, but it was only expected to get more windy as the day went on. (Since this needed to be a quick check since it was only marginal weather for beekeeping, all the photos in this post are courtesy of my mom.)

The first hive I opened was the colony that had had the most honey going into winter. The winter cluster looked (from what I could tell having never looked at a winter cluster in person before), pretty good. It seemed like a decent size; there were still plenty of bees left. They didn’t seem very happy about having the chilly wind suddenly blowing on them, though.

I could see that they still had honey left, but it looked a little scattered, from what I could tell without really taking things apart. It also wasn’t something I could just rearrange to get the honey next to the bees. I did still have a couple of candy boards left over from last winter, though… I decided to go get those out to give to the bees, just in case.

The candy boards (and smoker). The candy boards are filled with hardened sugar, and have a mesh on the bottom that holds the sugar in place while being large enough for the bees to go through to eat the sugar.

That ended up being easier said than done; one of the candy boards was starting to come apart (I was pretty much improvising when I built them… the other one had turned out all right, though). Once I opened the hive for the second time, the bees really started coming out. Some of them seemed upset, and some of them just seemed confused, and cold. But they were all over the surface I needed to set the candy board on. Setting it down without crushing bees was going to be difficult. After I got it in place (I don’t think I crushed many bees, but it was kind of hard to tell this time) I noticed that there was a bit of a traffic jam at the entrance as all the bees that had flown out when I opened the hive tried to get back inside at once.

A traffic jam at the entrance. The entrance is reduced to a pretty small hole to keep mice out of the hive.

The second hive check went much smoother. At that point I was assuming I would have to put a candy board on for them, but they actually seemed a bit better situated than the others. I already had the candy board out and ready to go, though, so I put it on anyway.

Getting the candy board situated on the hive.

Now it has returned to cold and snowy, and the bees are back out of sight in their hives.

Honey Bees in the Winter

Honey bees flying in late November. — My honey bees flying in late November after an early cold spell.

When it gets too cold for the honey bees to leave their hives it can be much harder to tell how the colony is doing. The hives look pretty lifeless on a cold winter day. There may be some dead bees scattered at the entrance. This is actually a good sign, especially if they are recently dead and as long as there aren’t too many of them. It means there are still live bees inside, and they’re cleaning out the dead. If there’s a warm day and the bees can leave the hive, they’ll clean off the entrance board of their hive and fly the dead bees away from it.

A dead honey bee dropped off into the snow by another member of her colony. — A dead bee dropped off into the snow by another member of her colony.

Another sign to look for when there’s snow on the ground is little flecks of yellow in the snow: bee poop. Bees do not poop inside their hive unless they are sick or it stays very cold for a really long time and they just can’t get out.

Honey bee poop on snow — Bee poop on the snow

The snow also seems to melt a little faster right on the entrance board when the bees are doing well. Other than that, you can’t tell much unless you get a really warm day and are able to take a peek inside, or at least see bees flying around the entrance. But for most of the winter, the bees will be hidden inside their hive, clustered together around the queen, vibrating their flight muscles to generate heat, and eating the honey they stored away during the summer. And then, at some point, usually around mid February here (if not even earlier), the queen will start laying eggs and the bees will have to raise the temperature inside the cluster (to above 90˚F) because the larvae need it extra warm to survive.

Flying Ants

swarming ants — Ant workers and queens on a leaf

A couple of times this year, I have witnessed the ant colonies in the yard swarming. Or at least, that’s what I’m inclined to call it; as a beekeeper, swarming means colony reproduction to me. But the process is different for ants, and I’m not sure swarming is the right word for their colony reproduction. All the colonies send out their young queens and drones (is drones what it’s called for ants?) to mate and presumably hibernate and start new colonies next spring. The workers do not accompany them as honey bees do. Each colony sends out dozens if not hundreds of queens. The queens seemed reluctant to leave; it looked like the worker ants were herding them out, and appeared to be chasing and even biting the young queens. The queens have good reason to be reluctant; their odds for surviving their flight are terrible. There’s a reason each colony sends out so many.

ants swarming — A queen being herded to the edge of a leaf

By the time I started taking pictures, most of the queens had taken flight already, (this first part happens impressively quickly) and many of those that were left had damaged looking wings. They were trying to leave, and the workers were insisting, but their wings were causing them difficulty.

queen and worker ants — This queen is actually missing one of her wings

ant queens and workers — Ant queens and workers on a leaf. A couple of them have slightly battered looking wings.

ant queen and workers — This queen seems to have good wings

ant workers and queens

All colonies of a particular species of ant sends out their winged offspring at once, and for a few hours, the air is thick with flying ants. Not too surprisingly, any creatures that like to eat insects see this as a brief opportunity to feast.

jumping spider eating queen ant — This is how most of the flying ants will end up; as food, not necessarily for a jumping spider specifically, but for many different predatory insects, spiders and birds.

I have seen ant colonies sending out their queens in previous years, but this year, not only did I see it happen twice, it seemed like there were just a lot more ants. It seemed like every few feet was another clump of ants, sending off their young queens. ant queen and workers