Assassin, or innocent bystander?
Last week, we had an assassin bug. So, what’s this one? At first glance, it doesn’t look all that much different from the assassin bug, other than coloration[1]. It even looks like it has a neck. If we look closer, though, there is a key feature that gives it away: the middle section of the hind legs (the tibia) is flattened and enlarged, kind of like a leaf.
This one is an assassin bug. It’s actually in the same family (Reduviidae) as the Thread-Legged Bug from last week, but it certainly doesn’t look like it:
Specifically, I think it is Reduvius personatus, commonly known as the “Masked Hunter”.
I’ve never seen one of these before, but I think that’s because they’re hard to spot, not because they’re particularly rare:
This is a “thread-legged bug” that I found in the bottom of the wheelbarrow after moving some old lumber. At first, I thought it was a tiny splinter of wood, before I realized that it seemed to be levitating slightly[1]. The legs are long, thin, and practically invisible, hence the name.
I was picking up apples in the side yard[1], and found this grub burrowing into one.
These are commonly referred to as “wireworms”. Unlike most other insect grubs, they have a hard exoskeleton that makes them remarkably durable. They are hard to crush, hard to pull apart, and all in all have about the consistency of a piece of wire. They do have legs, which you can see above, but they barely use them and for the most part their behavior is quite wormlike.
I hate these soooo much . . .
This is one that, as a hobbyist beekeeper, I am all too familiar with:
This is a varroa mite, Varroa destructor[1]. They are a parasite of honey bees, derived from a parasite of the asiatic honey bee Apis cerana. The asiatic honey bee has established a stable host/parasite relationship with their strain of varroa mites, so the mites don’t wipe out their colonies. Unfortunately, the western honey bee Apis mellifera, the one that most of modern beekeeping is based on, has not established such a relationship, and if left alone these mites will wipe out a normal western honey bee colony within 1-3 years, depending on the climate. These mites got into North America (probably on imported bees, but nobody is quite sure when or where), in the early 1980s, and have come close to wiping out both commercial and hobbyist beekeeping in the US several times since then.
I’m sure everybody has seen these:
This is obviously a larder beetle, Dermestes lardarius. It is a little fellow, only about half a centimeter long or so. They get into decomposing garbage, stored foods with bad seals, and similar things[1]. Since they find our garbage so appealing, they have been carried by us pretty much around the world.
What you hear screaming in the trees in the summer
We are a bit too far north for the well-known “periodic cicadas”, the ones that come out in masses every 17 or 13 years to raise a ruckus. The ones that we have are the “dog day” cicadas, that come out every summer when it gets hot to yell in the treetops.
Technically, this one wasn’t on our property, but the ones that were in our yard were at the top of the cedar tree and I couldn’t reach them. This one was found dead on a trail only about a mile from the house[1], though, so I’ll take it. From head to wingtip it is about 2 inches long, which again was way too big to be photographed with the macro lens.
Last week, I was out helping S_ drag a body into the woods[1], when she called out, “I just found a really cool looking grasshopper for you . . . hey, it bit me!”
So I said, “Is it green, with really long legs?”
These large moths were pretty plentiful back in June (as in, I saw about a dozen of them this year). This particular one was attracted by the light from our back door at the time. The blue on their body is actually very iridescent (an effect that I have a hard time capturing on camera).
The Fly
The first picture I posted in the arthropod project was a blurry image of what was, probably, a housefly. Here is a much better picture, which even shows the wing veins, which make it possible for me to say that it is, probably, a housefly [1]
Well, obviously, since it was in the house, making a nuisance of itself, then of *course* it was a housefly. The only question is whether it is the “real” housefly, Musca domestica, or just some related fly that got into the house. I think it is the real thing, based on comparing some diagrams of wing venation that Bug Guide connected to, so we’ll go with it. Supposedly you can tell if it is male or female depending on the space between the eyes, but there are surprisingly few pictures of houseflies on Bug Guide[2], and I don’t really have much to compare it to.