What’s worse that biting into an apple and finding a worm?
Biting into an apple and finding half a worm![1]
We never spray our apple trees, and so it is pretty common to have little fellas like this in the apples. This is one of the reasons I like to cut an apple into quarters to eat it, instead of just eating it whole. That way, I have a chance to see if there is a worm inside, and to separate it and its “frass”[2] from the part of the apple I want to eat.
When I found this beetle crawling across the floor in the basement, I knew what it was right away:
It’s a darkling beetle, Tenebrio molitor.
These ants are all over our yard. They tend to live in pretty substantial nests under objects, and they sent queens like this one out on mating flights in the middle of July, when I caught her:
You might notice that she only has one wing. The other had been torn off, probably because she’d finished her mating flight and was looking for a good place to make a nest. The reason the other one looks a bit funny, is I had tried to stick her down with a drop of honey so that I could get a good picture of her underside:
One of the feral apple trees about 100 yards behind the house has very “late” apples, that stay on the tree a loooong time. As in, as of now (mid-December, with a couple of feet of snow on the ground), it still has some apples that were too high for the deer to eat. The apples were actually getting ripe in mid-October, and one of them that I picked to eat had a deep crevice in its surface[1]. Down in the bottom of the crevice was this beetle:
We get these big honking beetles flying around for a brief period in the late spring/early summer. For us, that means early-to-mid June, so people here call them “June Beetles” or “June Bugs”. Further south, they are “May Beetles”. Last June, this one evidently smacked into the window in our back door overnight and stunned itself[4], which would be why I found it laying on the ground there in the morning.
Note: this is a North American funnel-web spider (and is harmless), not an Australian funnel-web spider (which are dangerously venomous).
Kitchen linoleum is a great place to find spiders – they stand out so well, particularly on light-colored floors, and usually they are far enough away from cover that catching them is a snap[1]. This fellow was scurrying across the floor, and once I caught him, he kind of scrunched up with his legs pulled in:
This crab spider was on the kitchen counter on July 5[1], strolling along just as bold as you please.
It appears to be a male goldenrod crab spider, Misumena vatia.
This little beetle was found out back, crawling around in my father-in-law’s hunting blind[1].
This one looks like a battle-scarred old veteran. I found it near the road, so it is possible that it lost its antenna and fractured a wing cover in an encounter with a passing vehicle[1], not in combat with some predator or prey:
This week we have a bonus bug, courtesy of my daughter
So, while I was finishing off the posting yesterday about the western conifer seed bug, my daughter came charging into the room with something in her hand, announcing “Take picture, Dada! Take picture!”[1] So, I did. This is what she had:
