Male Spider with Brass-Colored Abdomen
I found this little spider (body length was only 3 or 4 millimeters) on the wall near our front door on June 11, 2015. From the enlarged pedipalps, I’m pretty sure it was a male.
His abdomen looks metallic, which is kind of unusual for a spider. The black-and-white pattern on his front legs is also fairly distinctive.
These beetles were all over the dogwood blossoms out back on June 8, 2015, so we brought a bunch of them back to the house for pictures.
At first, we thought that there were two different species – brown ones, and black ones. But then we noticed that a lot of the black ones were busy mating with the brown ones, and we realized that they were all one species and this was just a sexual dimorphism.
Sandy found this shiny green beetle in one of her raised-bed gardens on June 6, 2015. While it doesn’t look all that much like the big, brown scarab beetles that we normally call “June Beetles” around here, it does appear to be one of them, even though it is only about half an inch long.
I found this crawling on the wall near our front door on June 23, 2015. And while this is a species that I photographed before, that was way back in 2007, and the previous pictures are not too good. So I says to myself, I says, “Self, you need to re-photograph this one.” So here it is.
Sam found this interestingly-mined aspen leaf while we were walking in the woods on June 8, 2015.
This long, squiggly track is characteristic of the Common Aspen Leaf Miner, Phyllocnistis populiella. It started shortly after hatching as an egg at the small end of the trail:
On June 8, 2015, Sam and I were walking out back and found that the dogwood blossoms were covered with numerous beetles. Including these attractive gold-and-dark-green beetles with script-like markings on their wing covers.
The girls found me this beetle on the window on June 7, 2015. I recognized it immediately.
It’s a Scarlet Malachite Beetle, Malachius aeneus. While I first found one of these in 2008, and then found a larva that we raised to an adult in 2010, I never really got a fully satisfactory set of pictures of the adults. So, let’s try again. This next picture is an exceptional pose that I rarely get – a beetle with wings fully extended:
As we were beach-hopping down the east coast of the Keeweenaw Peninsula on July 12, 2015, we found these two specimens. The first is similar to one that we’ve seen before – the enormous Elm Sawfly.
Woodland Ground Beetles From Bete Gris
Another thing we saw on our trip to Bete Gris on July 12, 2015, was a number of these beetles rummaging around the sand on the beach, right near the water line. They were jet-black, and actually looked like they were having a hard go of it due to the sand rolling around underfoot, and occasionally being hit by waves. Here’s one in my hand, so you can see that they are only medium-sized beetles.
On July 12, 2015, we went up to Bete Gris Beach, on the east side of the Keeweenaw Peninsula. It was a nice day, and this is one of the few proper sandy beaches in the area[1]. Anyway, we spotted this bright-red bug that was willing to stand still enough on my hand and arm for pictures.
