Wednesday afternoon was warm and sunny, for just about the first time since last fall. S_ was working out in the yard, and called me outside, saying “There’s a swarm of bees in the driveway!” And so there was. There were about 100 of these guys, circling around the light-colored, sandy parts of the driveway and flying at an altitude of about 1 to 4 inches. I tried photographing them as they flew, but they were too quick for me. It took quite a few tries, but I eventually caught one in a jar:
This could possibly be one of the most boring, hard-to-identify moths in the world. [1]. Still, I want to be comprehensive in these pages, which means I can’t just skip the boring ones.
We found it on October 21, 2007. The wingspan as it rested was about 3 centimeters, so while it wasn’t a huge moth, it wasn’t tiny, either. It was on the window of the door leading from the kitchen to the entryway, which meant that I could turn on the kitchen lights and the entryway lights and get pictures of it from both sides.
Here is the top side:
and here is the underside:
Here’s another little guy. Once again, it was found on the window, in mid-July of 2007.
The way the wings are held and the general shape makes me think it is a Tortricid moth. This one is a bit unusual, in that it actually has some lumps and bumps on its wings, giving it a more three-dimensional camouflage than most other moths have.
OK, I’ll be up front with you: I really don’t know what kind of moth this is [edit: now I do, see below]. It’s a bit over a centimeter long, and was fluttering around the light in our entryway on August 2 of 2008.
Here’s a large, furry moth that obligingly posed on the screen of our back door in mid-June of 2007.
It has the build of some of the moths in the subfamily Arctiinae, the Tiger Moths.
We regularly find these wasps building nests like this one in a bunch of places, generally anywhere that they are protected from the rain and wind. They are usually in my father-in-law’s hunting blind out back, they really like the old carriage-house, they are fond of the little enclosure that I keep beekeeping supplies in, and they really, really like the inside of the metal cover over the filling port on our propane tank[1].
This wasn’t actually found on our property, and properly speaking they don’t even live in the wild in Michigan, but if we keep bringing in houseplants we will probably get an infestation of them sooner or later. Our friend Michelle found it, along with a bunch of others, in a greenhouse at the University, and gave it to us so I could get some pictures.
I found this wasp crawling on our window at about the same time as we found last weeks Blue Mud Dauber (mid-July of 2007[1]). This is the related Black and Yellow Mud Dauber, Sceliphron caementarium.
When I was a kid, I used to find these blobs of mud stuck on our farm buildings, mostly under the eaves or in other spots where they would be protected from the rain. When I broke them open from time to time, they were either filled with paralyzed spiders, or had a wasp pupa inside. I’d often watch them being repaired and stocked by wasps that looked like this:
This is another old picture that I took in 2007, and the wasp was large enough that I tried getting the pictures without the macro lens, which is why the pictures came out a bit blurry.
These were pretty numerous in early June of 2007, both inside and outside the house.
I’m pretty sure that this is a conifer sawfly, in the family Diprionidae. Sawflies are in the same order as bees, wasps, and ants (Hymenoptera), and have a lot of wasp-like characteristics, except that they don’t have the narrow waist and don’t have stingers.